The Hocoos AI website builder has shut down, so there is nothing left to review as a product you can buy. Its pricing page now reads "Hocoos is no longer operating", and it set April 23, 2026 as the last day to download sites, after which websites and stored data were to be permanently deleted. If you are here because your Hocoos site went dark, the useful questions are how to get your domain, email and content back, and what to build on next. This page answers both.
Everything quoted below comes from the shutdown notice and FAQ on hocoos.com/pricing, checked Oct 2026. Some other pages on hocoos.com still show old marketing copy promising a site in five minutes, which is confusing. The pricing page notice is the authoritative statement.
What Hocoos was, briefly
Hocoos was an AI website builder for small businesses, freelancers and creators. You answered a short set of questions about your business and it generated a site with pages, text and images. Around that it offered blog, online store, portfolio and booking builders, industry templates, and an interface in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish and Chinese. According to the notice, domains bought through Hocoos sat with name.com and custom mailboxes with PolarisMail, which is why the shutdown affects more than the website.
What the shutdown notice says, point by point
- Why: the notice says only that the platform is being discontinued.
- Downloads: you could export an HTML copy of each site until April 23, 2026. Each download link stayed active for 7 days.
- What the export held: an HTML copy of the site, spreadsheet (XLS) files of store products, customers and orders, mailing lists, booking clients and appointments, plus images and video.
- What stopped working in the export: contact, subscribe and feedback forms, bookings, checkout, and integrations connected through Hocoos.
- The editor and dashboard were disabled once the closure began, so sites could no longer be changed.
- After April 23, 2026: sites on the platform are no longer accessible, and accounts and stored data are deleted.
- Billing: no new subscription charges after the announcement, subscriptions cancelled automatically, and pro-rata refunds for the unused period from April 23, 2026, sent automatically to the original payment method.
Getting your domain back
This is the most important step, because the domain is what your customers, Google and your printed cards point to. There are two cases.
- You bought the domain elsewhere, for example at GoDaddy, Namecheap or Cloudflare. It stayed yours the whole time. Log in to that registrar and point the DNS records at your new host.
- You bought it through Hocoos. Hocoos asked owners to transfer it into their own name.com account to keep managing it. If you did not, contact name.com support with proof of ownership, such as the original receipt and the email address used at purchase.
- Not sure which? A WHOIS lookup on your domain shows the registrar. If it says Name.com, it was almost certainly bought through Hocoos.
- Check the expiry date while you are there. A domain that lapses can be bought by someone else, and getting it back is hard.
Email, refunds and customer data
If you used a Hocoos mailbox such as hello@yourbusiness.com, the notice asked owners to move it to their own PolarisMail account by April 23, 2026. If your email stopped arriving, contact PolarisMail directly. If you cannot recover the mailbox, set up email with any provider on the same domain once you control it, and update the MX records.
Refunds were meant to arrive automatically on the card or account you paid with, for the time left on your subscription after April 23. If nothing has shown up, check statements from late April onward before contacting support. If you ran a store or took bookings, remember that orders, customers and appointments lived in Hocoos too. Unless you exported the spreadsheets, your own email receipts and calendar invites may be the only record left, so gather them now.
If you missed the download deadline
The notice is clear that data could not be recovered after April 23, 2026. That does not mean your content is gone from everywhere. Rebuilding is mostly a gathering job.
- Search for your domain on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Public pages that were crawled can usually be viewed, and you can copy text from them.
- Search Google for your business name with quotation marks. Directory listings, your Google Business Profile and social posts often repeat your descriptions and opening hours.
- Collect your original photos and logo from your phone, laptop or whoever designed them.
- Look in your sent email for anything you wrote for the site, such as service descriptions or an about page draft.
- Write a one-page brief: what you do, where, prices, opening hours and the action you want visitors to take. Any new builder will produce a better site from that than from old copy alone.
Builders that replace Hocoos
Hocoos users mostly wanted the same thing: a decent business site quickly, without learning a design tool. These are the closest replacements, each picked for a different situation.
- Durable is the closest in spirit. It generates a site from a short brief and adds bookings, a CRM and local SEO tools. Launch is $25 a month, or $22 billed yearly, checked Oct 2026. Read our Durable review.
- Wix suits people who want an AI start plus a full editor and a large app market. Its US yearly plans start around $17 a month, and prices vary by country. See the Wix review.
- Hostinger's AI Builder suits a tight budget, bundling hosting, a domain for the first year and email. Its Premium plan was $2.49 a month on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99 a month, when checked in Oct 2026.
- Framer suits design-led businesses and portfolios. Basic is $10 a month billed yearly. See the Framer review.
If your old site had a feature you could never quite get right, such as a price estimate or a quote form with your own rules, an app builder is worth considering. VibeDream builds a React front end with a FastAPI backend in Python from a chat, and you can attach screenshots from the Wayback Machine to rebuild the look. Your own domain connects with a TXT and a CNAME record on www or a subdomain. Root domains are not supported yet, so forward the bare domain to www. Plans start at $49 a month and there is no free plan, which is more than Hocoos cost. For a simple five-page site, Durable or Wix is the cheaper answer.
Choosing a builder that cannot strand you
Hocoos handled its closure better than many: it offered HTML and data exports, a guide for moving domains and mailboxes, and refunds for unused time. The people who lost the most were the ones who never saw the emails. Before you commit to any replacement, check four things.
- Register the domain yourself, at a registrar you choose, and keep its login in a password manager.
- Use an email provider separate from the site builder, so a builder change never takes your inbox with it.
- Find out what you can export: pages, form submissions, customer lists, and ideally the site as code. VibeDream, for example, lets you download a ZIP or sync to GitHub at any time.
- Make sure the address on your account is one you read, because that is where any closure or billing notice will go.