We're fixing the internet.

A potter with forty pots. An artist who adds a painting once a month. A charity with a page of news and a donate button. Most of them pay every month for a whole web platform: a database, a dashboard, an editor with a little pencil icon you have to learn. All to show fifteen paintings and a phone number.

The price that got them in is rarely the price they keep paying. A common hosting plan costs about £24 in its first year and about £168 a year after that (we priced it here). And once a site has been built the hard way, leaving starts to feel more dangerous than staying.

For years, when someone asked us where to put their website, we said Squarespace. It wasn't a bad call at first. Off-the-shelf tools were easy, and that ease was seductive. But it's grown into something else. Now every site looks the same, costs far more than it should and uses far more energy than a few pages ever need. And agencies are rewarded for putting clients on these platforms in bulk, so for years we were building the platforms' businesses instead of our clients'.

At the same time we were hosting websites for friends, artists and charities for nothing, because that's what you did for people you liked.

So we'd been sitting on the same secret for a long time: most people don't need any of that.

Twenty years ago, all that machinery was the only way to build a website without writing every page by hand. Databases were there to save people from code.

Now the machine writes the code. So a website can go back to what it was in 1997: fast, simple and yours. Built once, served for pennies, rebuilt in seconds when something changes. Except this time nobody has to write it by hand.

Bernard picks up the site you already have and moves it across. Every old address points to its new one, so the Google ranking you built up comes with you.

From then on you change your site by asking, in plain words. Every change lands as a draft you approve. Bernard keeps the site fast and easy for search engines and AI assistants to read, and once measuring is on he reads your numbers each week and suggests what to do next.

And he doesn't take hostages. Your domain stays yours, your members pay through your own Stripe account, and if you ever leave, your content goes with you. One flat price per site, on the pricing page.

We started out giving free sites and tools to charities, arts organisations and individuals - to help us and them get off the ground. This is still part of our mission. If you run something arts or community-spirited, Bernard Gives is how we partner with you.