How long, how many revisions, and how much: building a website with AI in 2026

Key findings

• Median time to a first full draft: 143 seconds. Half of successful drafts took 93 to 211 seconds; 90.9% (359 of 395) finished within 5 minutes.
• A revision by prompt took a median of 153 seconds, and 91.7% of revision jobs succeeded (88 of 96).
• 263 of 314 projects (83.8%) asked for no revision at all; only 12 (3.8%) asked for three or more.
• Overall success rate: 79.7% (483 of 606 jobs), 77.5% for first drafts and 91.7% for revisions.
• 129 of 468 projects created in the period (27.6%) were live (status published) when the data was pulled.
• Cost per site on paid plans: $3.00 (Starter), $1.90 (Pro) and $1.56 (Business) per month when every site slot is used. The Free plan's 5 AI actions per day already covers the 1.93 actions an average project used.

Time to a draft and to a revision (successful jobs, seconds)

Revisions per project (n = 314 projects)

What it costs: plan price per site

Forgelo's public plans, as shown on the pricing page on 10 October 2026. Cost per site assumes every site slot on the plan is in use; with fewer sites the cost per site is higher.

One AI action is one generate or one edit by prompt. The quota is a rolling 24-hour window. Failed jobs do not count. This page does not price freelancers, agencies or other builders; for that see our guide How much does a website cost in 2026?. See the pricing page.

By month (all finished jobs)

Output language of successful first drafts (n = 395)

Methodology

• Source: Forgelo's own production database, tables generation_jobs (one row per AI request) and projects (one row per website). Read-only queries; no row was changed.
• Period: rows created from 26 June 2026 (first job) to 9 October 2026. Data pulled on 10 October 2026. One job still running at pull time is excluded.
• Internal accounts (6 team and test accounts: 38 jobs, 29 projects) are excluded.
• A revision is a job whose input contains a revision instruction for an existing draft. Every other job is a first draft, including retries after a failure.
• Time is completed_at minus created_at, so it includes queue wait. Failed jobs also carry a completed_at value, but they are left out of all time figures and count only toward success rates.
• Published share is the project status at pull time. The database does not store the moment a site was first published, so this page does not report a time from prompt to published site.
• Cost per site is the public monthly plan price divided by the plan's website limit.
• Business type is not reported: projects have no reliable business category field (most showcase labels are empty or "other"), and we did not classify private briefs.

Limitations

• This measures one product (Forgelo). It is not a benchmark of other AI builders, freelancers or agencies.
• A first draft is not a finished website. Review, editing, a custom domain and content you supply yourself take extra time that is not measured here.
• The AI model and infrastructure changed during the period, which is one reason the monthly medians differ.
• Users who never revised may have been satisfied, or may simply have left; the data cannot tell these apart.

Download the data

Anonymised rows behind every figure (date, first draft or revision, status, language, seconds, attempts, and a sequential project number; no user, email, brief or project name):

• forgelo-jobs-2026-10.csv
• forgelo-projects-2026-10.csv

Citing this research

Earlier edition (data to 26 September 2026): How long does AI take to build a landing page?

Want to time it yourself? Generate a website with Forgelo