Hostus vs Carrd:
two ways to end up owning your page

The short version. Carrd is nineteen dollars a year for a custom domain and forty nine for the ability to download your site, which makes it the only builder in the link in bio category with a real export. Hostus is nine ninety nine a month, and there is nothing to export because you uploaded an HTML file to begin with.

Pick Carrd if you want to drag elements around a canvas and see the result immediately. Pick Hostus if you would rather describe the page in a sentence and have an assistant write it, then keep editing the live page in place.

At a glance

Checked at the source on 2026 09 08.

Where Carrd is the better answer

We are not going to pretend otherwise on these.

• Price, on paper. Nineteen dollars a year for a custom domain is roughly a tenth of what Hostus costs annually. If the only job is one page on your own domain and you are happy in a builder, Carrd wins on cost and it is not close.
• Immediate visual feedback. You move a thing, you see it move. Prompting is a round trip: you describe, you read, you adjust. For fine visual tweaking, dragging is faster.
• No assistant required. Carrd needs nothing but a browser. Hostus assumes you have Claude or ChatGPT open and are comfortable prompting it.
• Canonical and meta controls exist. Most of this category does not expose a canonical URL at all. Carrd does, at forty nine dollars a year.

Where the file model wins

There is no export step, because there was never an import step. Carrd's Download Sites is genuinely the best export in the category, and it still costs forty nine dollars a year and produces a snapshot of something built inside their editor. With Hostus, the artefact and the file are the same object the whole time.

The layout ceiling is the assistant, not the tool. A builder can only produce what its component library exposes. A hero card with a number counting up, three bars that grow on load, a review carousel that fades, and a background that drifts, all under a prefers-reduced-motion guard, is a normal afternoon for an assistant writing HTML and awkward or impossible in most builders.

The page can report back. Hostus tells you which sections of a page were actually read, and any form in the HTML starts collecting responses with no backend, no key and no service. Carrd's form element needs a third party to receive the submission.

Editing keeps the link. Hostus has an inline editor and keeps every version, so changing the page never changes the URL and you can roll back.

The prompt, so you can compare the output

Run this, then build the same page in Carrd's editor and see which one gets closer to what you had in your head. That is a more useful comparison than any table.

Build a single HTML page to use as the link in my Instagram bio, replacing my Linktree.

MY LINKS (paste what you have, in this priority order):
- Current Linktree or bio page: [url]
- Website: [url]
- Instagram: [url]
- Google Business Profile (listing or search): [url, or business name + city]
- Anything else I want on the page: [url] - [url]

Leave anything blank and skip it.

WHAT TO DO FIRST
1. Read all of it. From the website, take the visual identity: fonts and colors in hex, and the logo. From the Linktree, take the existing links and their titles. From Google, take the rating, the number of reviews, the address and two or three short quotes. From Instagram, take the handle and the tone of voice.
2. Before building, show me in one short message: the palette (five or six colors, each with the job it does), the font you picked (use the site's font if it is on Google Fonts, otherwise the closest match), and the list of links in the order you propose, each with a title and a one line subtitle. The first link is the main call to action and gets the emphasis. Ask me if that is right and only build after I confirm.
3. Then build the page.

PAGE RULES
- Mobile first: one column, about 440px max, centred, large tap targets, iPhone safe area
- One file, no dependencies beyond Google Fonts, icons as inline SVG, logo embedded as base64
- Pick the structure, do not assume it. Tell me in step 2 which shape you chose and why. A roastery and a tattoo studio should not come out with the same skeleton in different colours
- The identity block has to establish who this is within one screen. A circular logo above the name is one way. A full bleed image with the name over it, a typographic lockup with no logo at all, or a wordmark on its own line are others. Choose from what the brand already looks like
- Then one block that makes the business concrete. Choose the form from what the business actually is:
    a number that genuinely matters, counting up from zero, with bars for the supporting figures
    what is available right now, as a list: today's dishes, the coffees on the shelf, the next three open slots
    the work itself, as a grid: pieces, rooms, past jobs
    a process in three steps, or a short before and after
  Pick one and commit to it. Do not stack all four
- If there is a Google Business Profile: a location block with the rating, stars, "X reviews on Google" linking to the listing, two or three reviews fading slowly from one to the next, and two buttons, book or contact, and directions
- Links: a stack of icon cards is one option, and it is the most common one, which is a reason to consider the others first. A numbered index, a compact text list with rules between the items, or a two column grid of tiles can all read better depending on the business. Whatever form you choose, the first link is the main action and gets the emphasis, and every target is comfortable to tap
- Motion stays subtle: one cascade on load of about 1.5 seconds, a periodic glow on the main call to action, one or two blurred shapes in the brand color drifting in the background, and everything static under prefers-reduced-motion
- OG meta tags and a favicon from the logo. WhatsApp links open with the message already filled in
- Calm, direct copy. No exclamation marks and no emoji
- Before you hand it over, render it at 390px wide and check the line breaks, the contrast and every link

Give me the finished .html file, ready to host.

What it produced here, all on the free plan: a restaurant, a coffee roastery, a tattoo studio. Fictional businesses, illustrative numbers.

Who should pick which

Pick Carrd if you want a visual editor, you want the cheapest path to a custom domain, and one page on your own domain is the entire requirement.

Pick Hostus if you already work with an assistant, you want the page to do things a builder's components do not cover, you want to know which parts got read, or you are going to publish more than one of these and want them all on links you keep and can edit in place.

It is worth saying that these two are on the same side of the real divide in this category. Both leave you holding a page you can take somewhere else. Most of the alternatives do not.

Good to know before you switch

Hostus is not a link in bio builder with a dashboard of draggable rows. The loop is: you describe the page to Claude or ChatGPT, you get one HTML file, you drop it into Hostus and you get a link. Changing a link later means editing the page in the inline editor or asking the assistant again, not dragging a row up two places on your phone. If reordering links in ten seconds from a bus is the job, Linktree does that better and we would rather you knew that now.

The free plan is 20 documents and 2 MB of HTML. A page like the ones above sits at about 14 KB, so the ceiling is real but far away. There is no click count per individual link either: Hostus reports which sections of a page were actually read, which answers a different question.