Should you Make a Website Builder In-House? Three Cases

Hosting providers that offer more than simply servers have an inherent advantage over competitors. The more features you have in bulk — like billing and control panels, a website builder, domains, email — the bigger is your piece of cake. Among them, website builders are particularly appealing, because of how easy they make launching websites for end-users.

We already talked about how much value a website builder brings to a hosting website. Many hosting companies consider developing their own solution instead of relying on buying licenses. But is it worth it?

Let’s see what happened to website builders of Namecheap, Hostinger, Timeweb and Reg.ru.

The Disappearance of Namecheap Site Builder

Namecheap developed their website builder in-house. It was initially released in 2021. It was even covered in TechRadar in 2022. However, if you visit Namecheap's official website right now, you won’t be able to find the website builder anywhere on the front page.

It’s still here, but it is hidden under multiple menus, while other hosting providers put their flagman products on the homepage. But why?

The site builder is hidden under two menus

This isn’t the only case of hosting providers investing into custom development, and then quietly hiding their product. We can't know for certain what happened since the company didn't release any official statements. We’re going to investigate three more cases of well-known companies with their own website builder that were canceled or stopped receiving updates.

Hostinger and Zyro

“Was” is a key word here. Zyro doesn’t exist anymore, despite tons of resources invested in its development and marketing. A couple of years ago you couldn’t escape the ads, but now — vanished.

What happened to Zyro?

Zyro was launched in 2019 by Hostinger as a standalone website builder product. The goal was to compete with platforms like Wix and Squarespace.

Between 2021 and 2022, Zyro was heavily promoted as an AI website builder and positioned as one of the fastest ways to launch a website, with aggressive pricing campaigns.

Zyro marketing banner

Hostinger used its large global customer base to cross-promote Zyro by bundling it with hosting plans and pushing it through SEO content, affiliate marketing, and discount-driven funnels.

Despite everything, It started to phase out in 2023 and the brand was gone by 2024.

Why Zyro retired

Zyro has possibly failed as a brand, but not a product itself. Its features and infrastructure were moved to the Hostinger Website Builder.

New Hostinger Website Builder

A possible reason to close Zyro as a standalone project is that Hostinger has to invest double the resources into its marketing and maintenance. From a financial standpoint, it became more efficient to merge Zyro with the main ecosystem of Hostinger.

Merging brands considerably lowers the cost for the website maintenance, marketing and maintenance expenses.

Timeweb and Craftum

The brand itself was launched in 2022.

It was positioned as a custom solution for no-code website creation and was meant to compete with standalone website builders on the market, such as Tilda, Webflow, Wix.

Craftum was included in a Moscow city SME support program in July 2024, which gave it promotion as Craftum was giving out free access to the website builder for entrepreneurs with free domains.

It has been actively promoted among news outlets and tech blogs during 2023-2024. But now, in 2026, you can barely hear anything about it.

What happened to Craftum?

The last major update on the official websites is dated 17.04.2025 — a little over a year ago. The social media accounts also haven’t received a lot of updates since August 2025. Right now, we can't see as much ads of Craftum as before.

Craftum users report that the program stopped receiving updates. The website builder is still technically live, but its market presence has vanished. There isn’t a trace of Craftum even on Timeweb's official website.

Timeweb official page for a website builder doesn't mention Craftum

Why Craftum slowed down

Although we can’t know for sure the reasons why Craftum went silent, we can make an educated guess based on the public information.

Official company data suggests that the website builder didn’t receive any external funding or investment — the company developed the software from its own budget. Investors aren't listed on any Craftum pages. But software development is very expensive. And as we can guess, Craftum's dev team is quiet small, not even close to Wix or Squarespace.

A website builder is one of the most expensive projects to start among SaaS. The price even for an MVP made with AI for a specific use case starts at $15K and can go up to over $500K. Even for an established hosting company, it's a lot of money and a big risk.

Besides, Craftum has major competition — Tilda dominates the website builder market of Post-Soviet States. After Wix and other big platforms had left Russia, more website builders tried to fill the niche.

It is likely that the investment Timeweb put into Craftum didn’t pay off, and the project was put on pause.

Reg.ru and Divi

How Divi banner used to look

Divi is not a website builder of its own, because it can’t function without WordPress. The landing page of Divi builder is still present on the Reg.ru official website, but it is not promoted anymore. There isn’t much information available regarding Divi and Reg.ru together.

What happened to Divi?

If we go on Reg.ru’s website, we can easily find their new website builder that is standing right above the WordPress solution in the menu.

Reg.ru menu with w website builder and WordPress builder

Divi is not completely discontinued — but it is not a priority anymore in terms of investment and development.

Why Divi failed

If we look at WordPress market share altogether after 2022, we can see that not only did it stop growing, but its usage has been slowly going down.

Although WordPress is a big system, its dominance is going to end. We talked about it in greater detail in our The End of WordPress Era article. You can see on the chart below how WordPress has essentially stopped growing, while AI website builders' growth rate is improving.

Growth rate of custom code, WordPress, and website builders from 2015 to 2022, and from 2023 to 2026

But long story short — users give preference to simpler tools. That’s likely the reason why Reg.ru is slowly abandoning Divi and promoting another solution, more secure and suited for casual users.

In-House Software = Big Risk

The three cases we described are very different in the sense that Namecheap Sitebuilder, Zyro, Craftum, and Divi don’t follow the exact same path.

Still, we can learn from their examples:

The idea of in-house development is not inherently bad. But no one should be delusional about how resource-heavy it is to build software and that no success is guaranteed.

Understanding how much websit builder development can cost in practice is difficult, because companies don't usually disclose this kind of information. We examined the minimal initial cost, but we can get an idea closer to reality by looking at CM4all case.

Ionos and CM4all

CM4all has historically been one of the most prevalent white label website builders among hosting providers in Europe, such as, for example, Deutsche Telekom and Strato. In 2010, it was distributed by 50+ providers all over the world. But nowdays, there is a big chance you haven't heard about this platform in years.

What happened to CM4all

CM4all was originally the product of a German software developer Content Management AG, which later named as we22 AG. However, in 2021 the company was acquired by IONOS — a major hosting provider. The white-label model continued, but the platform ultimately became an internal product of IONOS. It hasn't been present on exhibitions ever since.

CM4all wasn't discontinued. Its official website is still running. Currently, it seems to be in the process of rebranding into Trinity.

The real cost of a website builder

IONOS acquired a full company with developers to continue working on the website builder. It is not exactly the same as developing your own product from scratch, but the case of CM4all is relevant to our analysis nevertheless, because practically IONOS did something similar to in-house development:

Practically, CM4all is an in-house product of IONOS now. According to the information of the official LinkedIn, there are at least 50 people working for we22, now the website builerd department of the company.

IONOS might be a big company with a lot of resources, but it is still extremely expensive to maintain software and it dev team. Each of these 50 people has to be paid, at least $50K/year. It rounds up to $2,5 million just for employees, not taking into the account additional costs.

CM4all landing page. Lots of text and vector illustrations, but no interface examples or public trial available

IONOS got a product that has already been developed, but maintaining it possibly take over $2,5 million from the company every year. At the same time, CM4all is not widely marketed, nor is it really accessible to B2C clients, because there isn't a way to try out the website builder or actually see how it looks on the website. We can't know how profitable it is in reality, but despite its scale it just doesn't compete with other website builders.

Final Thoughts

In the end, getting a white-label website builder is safer. It requires very little budget to launch, while maintenance is managed by the developer. The quality of the main hosting services won't take a hit from a new project in development.

White-label solutions are customisable and easy to deploy. And more importantly — you can test multiple of them before committing to one. If you start your own development and then stop it — the resources are gone.

Still, when you develop something from scratch you have more control over the program's design and interface at the cost of more risks. Decide for yourself which is more important for your company — having a tested and ready-to-launch product, or having an independent product in your list of services.