Verified purchaser
Possibly decent product. But some key missing features, many answered questions, and nearly no support give me pause. Time will tell. Developer needs to take these things seriously for this to be a good deal. Could be really good if things improve.
Summary: This is a product and deal that COULD be really good. But there are some key missing features that the developer does not seem to care about adding, there are MANY unanswered questions that are crucial to know the answers to, and the the developer needs to show that they will support the product after the refund window before anyone should consider putting an important website on it.
Pros:
1. The editor is mostly pretty good. Designing by dragging-and-dropping is, for me, better as an overall experience than adding blocks to Wordpress. It means you can come up with designs more easily and get them published.
2. Sites are fast. My sites on Webstarts are MUCH faster at loading than the equivalent builds on Wordpress shared hosting.
3. Uptime is good/okay, depending on your needs. My monitor has it at 99.97% over the last week. That 0.03% doesn't sound like a lot, but it could be to some people. Is probably fine for the sites I am putting on it.
4. Been around for 20 years, which hopefully means they will stick around.
5. Yes, if it works out, the deal terms are good.
Cons:
1. Support. By far the biggest problem, and the developer has shown that they don't care about this just in these AppSumo comments. There are TONNES of unanswered comments, questions, etc. The ones that are answered are extremely short in response. I have multiple e-mails to support from almost 2 weeks ago that are unanswered. What if your website goes down in the future or there is a serious problem? Will support never answer? They say they have a telephone number you can call, but, will they answer?
2. No idea what the security situation is. There is NOTHING on their websites about firewalls, DDOS prevention, etc.
3. Similarly, no idea what the CDN situation is. Developer comments say AWS. Website says nothing. So they could change this to some other one in the future to a not-as-good-one.
4. No way to manage your storage. You can't even see how much space you have used across your entire account, let alone one website. So how are you meant to manage multiple websites?
5. WebP images do not work. Despite what the developer says. You upload a WebP file, it converts it to PNG and delivers as a huge PNG file.
6. Cookie Consent box does not work. You turn it on and nothing happens. Also no customisation options for it at all.
7. No way to make a simple password-protected page.
8. Sites are not truly responsive. Looks like there are 2 sets of code: one for desktop and one for mobile.
9. Following this, this makes it super-inefficient to load. So while I get fast loading speeds, I get big warnings in Google Page Speed Insights, causing a massive 11 SECONDS of render blocking. Also slow server response (720ms).
10. There are some bugs. Like after saving, your website moves around, or items rotating themselves, or backgrounds for headers not showing in the editor, or animations are out of time (e.g., set 2 objects spaced 4 seconds apart. The one that should show 2nd shows 1st).
11. There are some HUGE pain points with the editor that make it HORRIBLE to use for full customisation. E.g., nothing telling you an item has an animation or link attached. So you have to keep setting it again just to be sure. Simple fix: Just make the icon blue, or something, if there is an active animation.
12. There are some key missing things from the editor. - (A) Image box : no option to change position of image inside (you can on image strip), (B) You can only select up/down/left/right for image position on strips, not specific. (C) There is no option for a different image position on mobile, or different image entirely on mobile, so images look wrong. (D) You can't hide items on desktop, to create something different on mobile. (E) There are ZERO options for your mobile site's menu, like background colour, position, etc. (F) Can't change settings for static header - e.g., different colour on scroll. (G) No option to ignore default hyperlink formatting, so it overwrites your design when you enter one. (H) Can't give a URL to ALL elements, e.g., columns. (I) Can't fade in splitters from left or right; only top or bottom. (I) And more.
13. Incentivised reviews on here.
14. DNS does not support AAA, CAA, DMARC, SRV.
The developer needs to take these things seriously. Simply having good terms of an offer that are a good price does NOT make a deal good. If the price is good, but support sucks, that's not a good deal. What if your site goes down and you never hear back from support? The key missing features are also crucial to anyone who actually cares about their websites, and the developer comments suggest they don't care to add them.
Time will tell with this one. Would probably be 4 stars if support was good. I would not host anything dynamic and super-important on it, but for relatively static sites where it's not completely traumatic if it goes down for a bit while you wait to hear from support, then it's probably a good deal.
Adam_WebStarts
Sep 26, 2025You have been very noisy in the comments about how you haven't received support. As the founder of a company that's been successful for over 20 years, and virtually losing money on these Appsumo deals I don't make it a priority to respond to every support request personally. Our official channels are the Chat on our site and support@webstarts.com. Team officially works Mon thru Fri 9am EST to 5pm EST. Support requests are responded to within 24 hours of the next business day.
1. These sites are hosted at AWS in various US Regions. We don't skimp on server instances, we have redundancy, and auto-scaling policies that ensure demands on our servers are met.
2. Keeping the above point in mind it's still possible to face outages. Our servers are behind firewalls and we have extensive DDoS protection. It weakens are security to discuss our architecture publicly. So I'm going to spare the details, just know we have extensive monitoring for unusual activity and it's our priority to keep customer sites online. More so, than even our own website. We wouldn't have lasted 20 years if that wasn't the case. At some point customers have to trust us.
When a site is offline with WebStarts it's nearly always do to something within the users control. For example, their domain expired, they forgot to make a payment, their card expired, and so on.
Your 99.97% uptime last week was probably from a third party tool that for some anomalistic reason couldn't ping our servers. We were up 100% of the time and historically we're up in the 99.99% range.
3. Our CDN is AWS Cloudfront. I have disclosed that in previous comments on AppSumo, although we do retain the right to change service providers. I get irritated when people imply in these comments that we'd go out of our way to make business decisions that aren't good for us and our customers. We need each other. Our goals are aligned.
4. The storage we provide in this AppSummo offer is ridiculous. No Appsummo user has consumed all their storage, and frankly it's not feasible for a legitimate website. Websites just don't take massive amounts of storage to build out. We don't have a meter showing you how much you used because the vast majority of our users are not from Appsummo. Being nobody is running out, it's low on our priority list to build out this feature just for the offer. You can manage your storage, just delete things you don't want from your file manager.
5. You can upload WebP images to your site, your point is they're not displayed in their native format. That's something we could make it happen but the net benefit is so small, there are more important improvements to make. I also want to point out WebP is a Google invented format, it's just more of them building their fortress. They don't have the customer's interested in mind. Example: Apple iPhones take photos in HIEC format but you go to Google's latest Gemini AI and upload that format, doesn't accept it. These big tech companies are who you should be skeptical about.
6. Our Cookie Consent banner does work. From some of your other complaints I can tell you probably are adding custom HTML to some of your pages. If it's not working, it's likely a conflict from that. It doesn't have a lot of customization options because there are many third party consent generators, again not a highly requested feature.
7. You can require a username and password to protect a page. If you mean just a password, you're right, it's not an option, not a commonly requested feature, and not a best practice.
8. Our editor uses absolute positioning, and that's what many people love, and you indicated you like it in your review. There's not currently a way to be "truly responsive" in your opinion and do that. So we serve different versions depending on the viewport. If the most important thing is truly responsive Wordpress and SquareSpace work great.
9. Our load times are good, our servers are fast, there may be small inefficiencies from addition requests but I'd argue they're nominal. Is it possible you're nitpicking here?
10. The bugs where things move around are because you put HTML into your page. We show a warning when you go to override the code it may cause conflicts. As long as we give you the freedom to enter that HTML there's going to be the possibility of causing a conflict. And inserting HTML widgets and the like is something our users want.
11. I think this is a matter of opinion. When you hover your mouse over many elements there are indications. Just not what you expect I suppose.
12. There are limited options for setting focal points on images but this can always be done with an image editor.
13. Way back when we first ran Appsummo they suggested we encourage people to review us by throwing in something extra. I followed their recommendation. As you've pointed out I'm not very concerned about reviews either way.
14. DNS supports everything. I guess you're just digging deep.