Lekker.build is an AI-powered website builder that guides users through a series of natural language prompts, allowing them to build their own production-grade website for just R69/month.
Created by South African entrepreneur Anthony van Tonder, the lekker.build platform has completed beta testing and is now open for the public to access.
“With the technology we have today, you shouldn’t have to need a web designer or be a web designer. You should have the information about your website, a few pictures, and it should be up in a matter of minutes,” Van Tonder told TechCentral in an interview this week.
“To us, the internet should be for everyone. It shouldn’t just be for the guys that can afford R3 000 to R4 000/month.”
Van Tonder’s inspiration for lekker.build came from years of consulting to small businesses. Other than the financial and technical barriers holding small business owners back, Van Tonder has observed that unscrupulous service providers take their non-technical clients for a ride, often gatekeeping crucial functionality for additional fees after initial payments have been made.
Built on Gemini
Lekker.build uses Gemini as its underlying model. Gemini generates the technical elements — the HTML, CSS and JavaScript — that determine the layout of the webpage. The tool goes a step further by using short descriptions given by the user to write detailed descriptions for specific sections of the website. The user is then free to edit these sections to their desire.
“The average user does not want be technical. This is a big thing for us,” said Van Tonder.
Read: Your Airbnb is empty half the year – this SA start-up has a fix
TechCentral tested lekker.build and had a test site up in less than five minutes. The one-page test site generated was for a fictional arts and crafts store whose logo was also generated using Gemini’s Nano Banana tool (this was done outside of the lekker.build interface). The clean, professional look of the output and how quickly it was generated were impressive, but questions about the platform’s ability to handle more complex builds lingered.
“We have a pipeline of changes that we’re going to make. One of them is multi-page websites. We wanted to get something up and running that speaks to the vast majority of small businesses. The vast majority of small businesses really just need a one-page website where a user can read a little bit about them, but more importantly, get in touch,” said van Tonder.
Hosting is handled through Cloudflare Pages, which keeps costs low enough for lekker.build to price its entry-level offering at R69/month, inclusive of a domain. Domain registration is handled through the platform itself, when customers check out. Suggestions and checks for domain name availability are done automatically. For South African domains, the site is typically live within 30-45 minutes of payment, said Van Tonder.
Alongside multi-page support, one-click Google My Business integration and an integration with WhatsApp are in the pipeline. The WhatsApp integration will allow users to give prompts and send images via the chat platform to build their website. According to Van Tonder, WhatsApp integration is crucial because for many small business owners, it is the major platform they use to run their businesses.
The system prompt used to guide Gemini in building user sites has been designed to identify and react to injection attacks that potentially threaten platform security. The system prompt is also tweaked to minimise hallucinations and incorrect output. For those instances where things do go wrong, a dedicated support function helps users overcome any difficulty.
For Van Tonder, the vision is for lekker.build is to enable an internet where any plumber, electrician, hairdresser or landscaper can have a professional online presence for low cost. As the platform grows, however, he foresees bigger website projects being supported. — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
Get breaking news from TechCentral on WhatsApp. Sign up here.