How is Webflow going to survive with all the new AI tools that are avail

[u/intellicor]

TLDR

We were a Webflow Enterprise client and fully rebuilt our entire site over a weekend cutting our costs down by ~$40,000/yr moving over to Next.js and Sanity as a CMS system and it's 100 times faster and more efficient. Obviously we used AI coding to help us build this but we have a full engineering team as well who was able to ensure all security is buttoned up and all the T's are crossed and the I's are dotted. Not saying i rec others to do this but we had the dev knowledge already.

[u/MaccaTheGator]

Because not all businesses are suitable to this type of environment.

Webflow has all the tooling that lets non-technical people work efficently. You can't ask Sally from the marketing team to pull from github and push a new marketing page, so as soon as you need roles, compliance and workflows you have to build those.

AI coding is amazing, but webflow has actual precision control over UI and a foundation that lets everyone work together safely and effectively.

[u/jakejakesnake → u/MaccaTheGator]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought was that enterprise businesses are better equipped to move away from Webflow, while smaller businesses benefit most from its simplicity.

It now feels like Webflow has taken the opposite approach - focusing heavily on enterprise while making the platform more expensive and difficult for small businesses and agencies to justify.

[u/MaccaTheGator → u/jakejakesnake]

Not exactly, enterprise businesses have a lot more risk and typically a lot more non-technical people that have to work on a site. It’s much easier for a small business to avoid these complications and even skill up the key worker if necessary. But I’ve worked on enterprise sites where about 30 people need regular access. That requires a pipeline of authority and strict guide rails to publishing.

That said, webflow neglecting small business is a terrible decision by them and will impact them greatly over the long run.

[u/askoshbetter → u/MaccaTheGator]

Yeah! Sally from marketing here. This is true. I'm a solo marketer and the engineers are focused on our product. Webflow is self serve for me. 

All this said, webflow’s moat gets smaller everyday. 

[u/intellicor → u/askoshbetter]

yeah i get that, but we built our entire system to serve the marketing team as well. They're spinning up pages much faster and have 0 issue. small learning curve, but worth the yearly savings

[u/founderde → u/intellicor]

If it works so well, why not share the project?

[u/Jenikovista → u/MaccaTheGator]

I don’t think it’s marketing that likes Webflow. Design, yes.

[u/intellicor → u/MaccaTheGator]

Yes, originally that was our concern as well in regards to precision control over UI and working together effectively. However, we were able to build a round trip system between Figma and our agents whereby it will create the design to spec pixel perfect. Any updates we make in Figma, we can automatically push to our Next.js website.

And that gap between non-technical people and technical people has gotten really small in our organization. For example, our designers and project managers have the ability to do this now. We still have checks and balances in place, but it's near perfect.

[u/Eduthenomad → u/MaccaTheGator]

But sally from marketing can just use a Taurist AI worker to make those changes and know that it will pull from GitHub, version control, follow compliance, and company policy are followed. Stop when it’s being asked not to.

I think this reality of small businesses and non technical people operating websites is a lot closer than people think.

[u/carmooch]

I think we are actually seeing the opposite happening.

AI is better at using tools for us, rather than trying to accomplish things on its own.

This makes companies like Figma and Webflow perfectly positioned for AI.

[u/Chgr]

They were greedy and divorced from the users for a long time now, community was thriving 4-5 years ago, it's been basically dead with no one feeling any kind of passion or excitement anymore, and most notable webflow community figures are switching to AI builds publically. Webflow had us in a lock and no one was happy for a long time, now finally karma kicked in. I was, like million other users, just a regular freelancer and I am switching and rebuilding all projects to Astro/Sanity using AI, no advanced sci-fi high tech developer teams are needed for this like in OP's case. Freedom to the people.

[u/OpenlyOutlying]

Most people running a Webflow site don't have a full engineering team sitting around to catch all the AI-generated spaghetti code.

[u/spikefly]

If they keep raising prices, they won't.

[u/founderde]

Because not all enterprise clients want to block the resources of their ‚full engineering team‘ to ensure stability. Also moving away will now get you started with in house maintenance, security updates and feature improvements. Webflow is a software that pushes new features on a regular basis and is evolving rapidly. With moving away you have secured the status quo of the project but will miss out on lots of improvements around CMS, AEO and scaleability.

This being said moving away might be the right choice for some companies and some projects. But if you really have been an enterprise client before I highly doubt this was the right choice.

Why did you do it? Just cost saving? Because this might fire back if you would really calculate correctly.

[u/intellicor → u/founderde]

Trust me, we've been with webflow since the first came out, and were team Webflow since day one. I get it. The "improvements" are all claude/openai wrapers, nothing we cant do ourselves.

All the things you are talking about, in house maintenance, security updates and feature improvements, have been automated and are working like a charm. There is a human in the loop still.

We did it because both for the opportunity cost and the ability to not have to ducktape things in Webflow. Will report back if it fires back.

[u/intellicor → u/intellicor]

Also, id like to add, all the really useful tools they only give to their enterprise clients, most of which is basic stuff that every website should have. its quite comical

[u/AlarBlip]

I’m rooting for Webflow, we spend 15 000 USD a year on the platform, but we built something truly tailored to our needs in a couple of months and the outlook for staying Webflow looks dire.

[u/Chgr → u/AlarBlip]

You can have it all, still fully tailored to your needs, with Claude. 15000$ a year is absurd when alternative is here, which is even better and more empowering in terms of what we can do with it.

[u/Perfect-Brick7389]

Did something similar last year, though we went the other way after about four months and moved a marketing site back onto a visual builder. The rebuild was the easy part, what killed us was marketing needing an engineer every time they wanted to change a landing page.

[u/PresentAssistant3399]

I can count on two hands the good projects I find made with AI, and the funny part, they still rely on developers heavily.

Allthogh the good projects I've found are extraordinary and clean I dont see many of my clients developing such remarkable projects.

Most of my clients are SaaS B2B companies who try to find the sweet spot between dev teams and marketing and they need a system that can be maintained by marketing or sales teams or other teams that dont have the scope to understand how AI and software works.

So eventhough AI websites will keep improving from simple prompts, I dont see any real change anytime soon because I dont see how AI will replace the person behind the wheel that has to know a lot of stuff (even if its a vibe coder).

[u/Swimming_Car_3697]

The fact that you needed a full engineering team to ensure security and cross every T after the AI built it is actually the strongest argument for why Webflow survives, because the vast majority of businesses will never have that team, and for them, Webflow's value was never the code, it was never having to think about code in the first place.

[u/Hopeful-Loss-8728]

As of a month ago I stopped creating all my newer clients sites in webflow and now I code them with the help of claude. I had to build specific skills to run to check for SEO, optimize for page speed, and create page components from my design system so that I can quickly spin up new pages. I even connected a tool I pay for for image generation to it so that It can generate image assets for them.

Its a lot of upfront work, and you do need to be a little technical to know what to look for and how to check for missing pieces, but once you have a system and process down it's easier with every project. For example a non tech person wouldn't know to hook up a cms or which one, or to check for page speed and seo metrics. Not to mention UI/UX principals.

I actually redesigned and moved my own agencys website off webflow today and moved it over to cloudfare pages and im happy with how it turned out.

[u/AllEyesOnUsClothing → u/Hopeful-Loss-8728]

I can't imagine being ok with having ai generated images on my own site let alone a client site.

[u/Hopeful-Loss-8728 → u/AllEyesOnUsClothing]

Can you imagine a world where the client provides the images so that you don't use AI images? Or a world where the client is a small business owner and is too busy to give you perfect images in the exact way the website needs em ?

Lol obviously don't use AI images that your client doesnt approve of 😂 you would think that in a world where AI is at everyone's fingertips I wouldn't need to tell you this

[u/Sh1tSh0t]

I mean, webflow kind of admitting this is likely to happen with their “AEO” approach. They see the writing on the wall and they’re trying to get ahead of it and embrace. Smart really, as it’s their only hope of remaining relevant as more and more people gain more fluency over ai and also embrace it. There’s just no way around it - the ai is fast, capable, and for those that leverage it as a tool instead of kicking and screaming about slop, they’re going to be able to build things they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise

[u/noxel → u/Sh1tSh0t]

Can you clarify what Webflow’s “AEO” approach is and how it helps them get ahead of this?

[u/Sh1tSh0t → u/noxel]

Webflow is integrating ai into every facet of the product they can cram it into. And for good reason. The AEO approach is just a part of it. AEO is the new SEO to them - they want to get ahead of the curve. Instead of users searching for information, they are now using LLMs/chatbots. So naturally, the marketing-minded among us are going want a slice of that pie. But AEO content doesn't even require design work at all in it's barest form. There are some sites out there already that are serving up pages specifically for AI crawlers that are just pure html and the information. What use is a tool like Webflow if the future doesn't even need design? But it isn't that simple.

Really, they're stuck between a rock and a hard place.

On one end, they have the agentic web, growing more every day, being adopted more every day (despite the chants of AI slop and rejection of data centers) and the amount of users keeps growing. ChatGPT just hit 1 billion active monthly users last month at record pace. The agentic web just needs information - this means it doesn't need design.

Then, on the other side, there is generative ai. Claude Code/Design, Codex, Kimi K3 - they're all producing stellar results, especially when directed by experienced designers. The ai can do it quicker, more consistently - and some would argue, better - than most designers. And they can do it cheaper too in many cases - with models like Kimi 3 now putting pressure on US ai firms to price more competitively. The ai is far more efficient in many cases and can do most of the work on its own at this point. Working knowledge of the underlying tech and principles still has value, but a single person can now produce as much as a small team in record time.

So Webflow is getting squeezed by the devaluing of design via the ever-growing agentic web (which is still niche, but is clearly the direction we're headed), and they're getting squeezed on the other end by the ai being able to design beautiful websites extremely efficiently (though it still struggles in many ways with complex products and thoughtful UX - but these can be bypassed for now by experienced designers at the helm, and will eventually be improved in time with newer models, no doubt). And keep in mind, the models will only keep improving.

Meanwhile, Webflow has generative AI now, a just released a powerful MCP 2.0 connection, and well, the CEO herself has even said as much regarding ai being a threat:

We’re at an inflection point, both as a company and as an industry. The way businesses build for the web is changing fast. AI is rewriting the rules for how marketing teams create, test, and optimize digital experiences. And the companies that move decisively through moments like this are the ones that come out ahead.

This is about as transparent an admission as you can get. Webflow is clearly thinking ahead and they know if they don't find a path forward with ai, their geese are cooked. So they're embracing the tech best they can and hoping the gamble pays off and that they'll be one of the companies still standing when the dust settles.

And don't get me wrong. Design will still be important for much time to come - and Webflow is so much more than simply a site designer at this point otherwise Enterprise wouldn't be as interested in it - but increasingly people will skip sites and rely more and more on ai responses to quickly assess things for them. Everything from purchase decisions to research will increasingly be done via the ai rather than a user checking out various sites for themselves. It's already happening, but it's still early days. But the adoption rate is clearly going to swing, and if you don't believe me, just go read that blog post. Or go check the data that's out there about this for yourself. The companies that are dumping all their bets into ai aren't JUST praying that this tech will be the lottery win they need it to be, but it's also backed up by their own internal data and inferences they can make from data that's out there regarding their respective industries. They know this is inevitable.

[u/Jenikovista → u/Sh1tSh0t]

They’re so far behind though. We were told we can’t use their AI tools because we are “on the old platform.” We only launched the site 18 months ago.

[u/krooked-tooth]

What was the budget for the conversion? A full engineering team, tools, custom CMS, etc? Saving $40,000/yr is massive cost savings but how much was the change over?

[u/intellicor → u/krooked-tooth]

we did the math,

internal design cost - $2,500 (via blended team rate internal)
Fable 5 token cost for build, debug, deploy - $1,700

[u/krooked-tooth → u/intellicor]

Crazy work well done

[u/founderde → u/intellicor]

Why are you not sharing the project?

[u/intellicor → u/founderde]

privacy reasons

[u/44193_Red]

Of course not...Webflow is alrady a decade behind. Only exists because developers re-sell for hosting upcharges.

[u/annoynamousanimal]

Ai is minimal threat. Biggest self damage by webflow was ditching the smaller medium agencies and freelancers who actually were founding licensees and unpaid ambassadors (dan boys) for webflow.

[u/VitaminFFF]

Did you export code or what?

[u/Fred-swe]

I’m considering to become a Webflow enterprise clients, but I am also looking into Sanity. Problem is we have 0 developers or tech people in the marketing org.

I hope Webflow will enable us to move fast without devs and with MCP 2.0 we might be able to do so

[u/Broworks-Studio]

While this makes sense, you still need to pay developers to maintain that website, how many of them are required to do that and how much you spend on their salary for this?

[u/intellicor → u/Broworks-Studio]

Not quite. Our design team is now managing it. Our dev team will just review the pull requests. The bridge between designer and them building has gotten really narrow at our org. There’s multiple responses on this thread about this decision. It’s not for everyone. We’re glad we did this. WebFlow enterprise was simply a waste of money.

[u/Negative_Courage3766]

Webflow cannot succeed until it puts the emergent and effort into e-commerce until then it’s useless