We realized we’re spending way too much on Framer for idea validation – so we built our own alternative

Over the last months I noticed something odd in both my side projects and our venture building work. We’re validating ideas quickly, but the tooling around landing pages has quietly become… expensive.

Typical setup for a “quick test”:

• Framer: $15–30/month
• Custom domain
• Forms + integrations

Multiply that by multiple experiments and suddenly you’re spending hundreds per month on pages that might live for 2–6 weeks.

What bothered me even more:
Most of the time, the actual value is just:

• a fast landing page
• good SEO defaults
• newsletter signup (with DOI; which is also a pain to setup)
• contact form
• multilingual

So over Christmas I tried something different.
I built a reusable landing page blueprint for myself using:

• Astro (fast, static, SEO-friendly)
• Netlify (free hosting)
• simple contact form (Brevo) + spam protection (Turnstile)
• newsletter handling
• i18n baked in

What really changed the equation for me was pairing this setup with AI tools like Cursor / Codex.
Instead of starting from a blank page every time, I can:

• adapt copy and sections directly inside the codebase
• generate new pages (e.g. blog posts, landing variants) from a structured prompt
• extend or tweak components

The template already handles the “boring but critical” stuff (forms, spam protection, i18n, legal pages), so AI can focus on content and structure, not wiring.
I even added small agent guides and a first-prompt example in the repo, so the AI knows how the project is structured and how to work within it.

The result feels less like “coding a landing page” and more like assembling and refining one — fast, repeatable, and brand-consistent.

So far it’s been:

• essentially zero recurring cost
• faster than starting from scratch
• more control than Framer — without losing speed

This isn’t a product yet.
Right now it’s just something I reuse internally.

But it made me curious:

• How do you handle landing pages for early experiments?
• Framer / Webflow despite the cost?
• Custom code every time?
• Something reusable?

And an honest follow-up question:

If a reusable, production-ready landing page setup saved you a few days and recurring costs — would you pay once for it, or would you expect this to stay free?