Webflow

Look, I've been covering tech long enough to smell the bullshit from three time zones away, and Webflow's landing page reads like it was written by a committee of consultants high on their own supply of "AI-native" buzzwords. The second I see "smarter sites start here" paired with the inevitable "personalized web experiences that drive real results," I know we're in for another ride on the venture-capital carousel of meaningless marketing speak. These people have convinced themselves they're revolutionizing web design when really they've just built a fancy drag-and-drop editor with delusions of grandeur. The fact that their own marketing copy got cut off mid-sentence ("With Webflow, we've sign...") tells you everything about the attention to detail here.

The interface itself is competent enough – it's essentially what happens when you cross Photoshop with WordPress and add a subscription model that would make Adobe blush. But here's what pisses me off: they're selling this as some democratization of web design while simultaneously creating a walled garden that locks you into their ecosystem tighter than a Tesla charging port. You want to export your work? Good luck with that. You want to actually own your creation? Better keep that credit card handy, because the moment you stop paying, your "custom website" becomes a digital pumpkin. It's the same old SaaS grift dressed up in prettier packaging.

The pricing structure – which they conveniently hide behind a "Try Webflow for free" button – follows the classic freemium bait-and-switch playbook. Sure, you can build something basic for free, but the moment you want actual functionality or custom domains or god forbid, remove their branding, you're looking at plans that start reasonable and escalate faster than San Francisco rent. They've got more pricing tiers than a wedding venue, each one designed to extract maximum value from whatever category of desperate entrepreneur or overworked designer stumbles into their funnel. It's subscription hell with a UI/UX bow on top.

What really grinds my gears is how they've positioned themselves as the savior of non-technical creators while simultaneously making the whole process more complicated than it needs to be. Yes, you can create websites without code, but you still need to understand their proprietary logic, their component system, their CMS structure, and about seventeen different settings panels. They've replaced HTML with their own abstraction layer and called it progress. It's like replacing a screwdriver with a machine that turns screws, but only their special screws, and only if you pay the monthly machine rental fee. The cognitive load hasn't decreased; it's just shifted to learning their specific way of doing things.

The most damning thing about Webflow isn't what it is, but what it represents: the continued SaaS-ification of tools that used to be simple and owned. They've taken the basic human desire to create things on the internet and turned it into a monthly recurring revenue stream. Sure, the output looks professional and the animations are smooth, but at what cost? You're not building websites anymore; you're renting the illusion of web development from landlords who can change the rules, raise the prices, or disappear entirely whenever market conditions shift. It's digital sharecropping with better typography.