Guide
How kwaku works.
Building a site with kwaku is like commissioning a writer instead of buying furniture from a catalog. You describe what you want, kwaku writes the code, ships it, and hands it back to you. No templates, no drag-and-drop, no monthly bill. This page walks you through the whole thing in plain English — including how to point your own domain at it.
The whole thing, in three steps
Step one
You describe it.
In the chat, type what you want. "A portfolio site for a marketing student, clean and minimal, with a contact form." That's the whole brief.
Step two
Kwaku writes it.
He reads what's there, writes the HTML and CSS, ships it. You watch the preview update on the right. Takes a minute or two.
Step three
You keep it.
Your site is live at yourname.kwaku.app. Want to use your own domain? Paste it in. Want the code? Export the whole thing as a zip any time.
Two shapes of site
kwaku starts every site as static — plain HTML and CSS, no database, served as fast as the internet allows. Think of it as a printed pamphlet: beautifully laid out, easy to hand out, but it doesn't do anything dynamic on its own.
When you ask for something that needs to remember things — a comment section, a member login, a publication list you can edit yourself through an admin panel — kwaku will offer to graduate the site to a full app. That's like turning the pamphlet into a working shop: still your design, but with a real backend behind it (Next.js + a database). Takes about 60 seconds, one click. Everything you already had carries over.
You don't have to think about which one you need at the start. Begin in chat, and kwaku will suggest the upgrade when the thing you're asking for actually requires it.
Using your own domain
Your kwaku site already has a free address — something like muhammed.kwaku.app. That works forever. But if you want a more personal-sounding URL like muhammed.com or muhammedswebsite.com, you can buy the name and point it at your site. Here's how to think about it.
The analogy
Think of kwaku as the building your house sits in. We give you a room there for free and ship it with a default address — muhammed.kwaku.app — which is basically "Muhammed, at kwaku's place." It's a real, reachable address. Anyone who types it gets to your site.
Most professional websites use their own name instead — muhammed.com, muhammedswebsite.com, studiomarketing.io. That name is a separate thing you have to buy: nobody owns it by default. You buy it from a domain registrar (a company that sells web names) for about $10–15 a year, the same way you might lease a vanity license plate that no one else can use.
Once you own the name, you just tell the registrar to point it at kwaku's building. Your house doesn't move. The default muhammed.kwaku.app address keeps working. You're simply adding a second, prettier name that leads to the same place.
What happens when someone visits
What you actually do
Buy a domain at any registrar — Namecheap, Spaceship, Porkbun, Cloudflare, Google Domains, whichever. They cost ~$10–15 a year. We don't sell domains; you keep it in your own account.
2In your registrar's DNS settings, add an A record for the domain. The "name" or "host" field is @ (which means the apex, i.e. the bare domain with no www). The "value" or "points to" field is 65.108.144.244.
Save. DNS changes take a couple of minutes to propagate. Have a coffee.
4In your kwaku dashboard, paste the domain into your site's "domain" field and click attach. If DNS has propagated, kwaku will issue a TLS certificate (a free, real one) within a minute and your site is live at your new address.
5If DNS hasn't propagated yet, kwaku will tell you exactly that — wait another few minutes and click "check again". No need to start over.
@ · Type A · Value 65.108.144.244
Some registrars also have a "www" field — set that to point at @ with a CNAME, or leave it alone. The kwaku dashboard has a toggle for whether you want www.yourdomain.com to redirect to the bare domain.
Pay-once, no subscription
Every edit you ask kwaku to make costs one "edit credit." You get 25 credits free when you sign up. After that, a pack of 50 more is $30, once — and this launch week it's free with code LAUNCH at checkout. The credits never expire. There is no monthly fee. No annual auto-renew. No "your plan ends in 7 days" emails.
Think of each credit as a stamp. Buy a sheet, use them when you want to update something, leave the rest for when you come back to the site in six months. If you never use them, you never paid for unused work.
Your site, your files
Click export on your dashboard and you get a zip of the entire site — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the works. Open it locally. Host it somewhere else. Hand it to a developer. We don't hold your code hostage. The whole point of kwaku is that what gets built is yours, not ours.
Common questions
Do I need to know how to code?
What does an "edit" cost a credit?
What if I make a mistake?
Can I change my yourname.kwaku.app address later?
Do contact forms actually email me?
Is there a free tier?
yourname.kwaku.app address is included for free indefinitely; you only pay when you want more edits, and only pay once.
Stuck? Don't sweat it.
Inside the editor, there's a stuck button in the preview header — click it and a real person (the operator) sees the message in their inbox. Outside the editor, write to hello@kwaku.app. Real replies, usually within a day. This isn't a maze of help-center articles; it's one human reading your email.