Short answer: the Webflow for Startups program ended on 30 June 2026. Webflow's own help centre states it plainly — the program was sunset, new applications are no longer accepted, and everyone already accepted is honoured through their existing committed period. If you are reading a blog post that tells you to apply for a free year of Webflow, it was written before that date and nobody has updated it.
We found this the way you would hope a perk directory finds it: by re-opening all 254 listings on 24 August and reading the page each one points at. Ours had been marked live, last checked on 22 May — five weeks before the shutdown. It is fixed now, and the honest version of that is on the record in the changelog.
What actually changed
| Before 30 June 2026 | Now | |
|---|---|---|
| New applications | Open | Closed permanently |
| The offer | 100% off the first year of a monthly Premium Site plan (and the legacy CMS Site plan) | Not available |
| Existing participants | In their committed period | Honoured to the end of that period |
| Promo codes already issued | Redeemable | Still redeemable, monthly billing only |
Two details matter if you were accepted before the cutoff and have not redeemed yet. The promo code applies to monthly billing only — it will not apply to a yearly Site plan, which is the single most common way people accidentally waste it. And it applies to a Site plan, so you add it in Site settings under Plans, not to your workspace seat.
Why the program pages still rank
This is the part worth internalising, because Webflow is not a special case.
A shut-down program does not usually get a press release. The landing page goes away or quietly redirects, a help-centre article gets an "Important" box added to the top, and every third-party listicle, affiliate roundup and AI answer keeps recommending it for months or years. Search engines have no signal that the offer died; the pages that describe it are still live, still linked, and still perfectly relevant to the query.
So the failure mode is not "bad information". It is stale information that was true when written, which is much harder to spot. You apply, you get no reply, and you assume you were rejected.
The live alternatives, in the order worth trying
Nothing on the market replaces "a free year of Webflow" one-for-one. What exists is a set of adjacent offers, and which one fits depends on what the site is for.
- Framer — the closest like-for-like as a visual site builder with a real CMS, and the natural landing spot for anyone who chose Webflow for the design control rather than the ecosystem.
- Vercel — if you were going to rebuild the marketing site in Next.js anyway, the startup track carries a flexible commitment up to $30,000 for Series A and earlier through a partner. Different shape of offer, much bigger number, requires a partner affiliation.
- Sanity or Storyblok-style headless CMS — if the reason you wanted Webflow was the CMS and your team can render the front end.
- Bubble — if what you actually needed was an app, not a marketing site, and Webflow was a compromise.
If the site is genuinely just a marketing site and you are pre-revenue, the unglamorous answer is that a static site on a free tier costs nothing at all and takes an afternoon. See best free-tier cloud hosting for what is actually free rather than free-for-12-months.
How to tell whether any program is still alive
Four checks, in increasing order of effort. They take about two minutes and would have caught this one:
- Open the program URL yourself. Not the listicle — the vendor's own page. A 404 or a redirect to a generic help centre is your answer. Webflow's startup URL now lands on a help article whose first block is the shutdown notice.
- Look for a dated notice. Vendors rarely delete these pages; they append to them. The date in that box is the real date, whatever the blog posts say.
- Check the application form loads and submits. A program page that still exists with a dead or removed form is a program in wind-down.
- Search the vendor's changelog or help centre for the program name. This is where sunsets get announced, because support needs something to link to.
What this means for how you budget credits
The practical lesson is about sequencing, not about Webflow. Startup programs are not a stable pool you can plan a year of runway against — a meaningful fraction of them close every year, usually without announcement. So:
- Claim early, claim in order of size. The startup credits checklist puts them in the order that avoids disqualifying yourself from the big ones by claiming a small one first.
- Do not build a cost model on an unclaimed credit. It is not money until it is in the account.
- Re-check anything you are still planning to apply to. Especially if you bookmarked it more than a quarter ago.
Perkstack exists for exactly this: every listing carries the date a human last opened the provider's page, and when a program dies it gets marked expired and stops being recommended. That is why this post exists at all. Browse the catalog or create a free account to see the dated version of every program you are considering.
rest of this guide
The rest of this guide picks up at "How to tell whether any program is still alive".
- How to tell whether any program is still alive
- What this means for how you budget credits
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