Changelog

v2.22026-07-18

Plans, credits, and getting paid

Helm has its own accounts and billing. Credits are the single currency for everything you do — a full site build costs 40, a change to a site you've already built costs 10, and a free account starts with one complete build, no card required. Your balance is checked before work starts, so you're never charged for a build that couldn't finish.

Feature: Plan and billing live at /account — subscribe, change plan, cancel, and open your billing portal without emailing anyone
Feature: Credits: 40 for a full site build, 10 for a change to a site you already have. A free account gets one full build, and your published site stays live even at a zero balance
Improvement: You're quoted before you're charged — Helm checks your balance up front rather than halfway through, and a build that fails is refunded automatically
Feature: Referrals: send a friend your link and they start with extra credits in their account. When they publish their first site, we top you up with enough for your team to make 4 more changes to yours
Feature: Sites you publish carry a "Built with Helm" badge — if someone signs up through it, credits land in your account without you doing anything
Feature: Shops can charge their real prices — a multi-item cart now checks out at the actual price of each product instead of one flat amount for everything
Improvement: Pricing and How it works are real pages now, not homepage anchors, and every page shares one navigation bar that works on a phone

v2.12026-07-18

Your projects, your domain, your call on publishing

Your projects page shows your actual sites instead of a wall of coloured initials, you can point a domain you own at a published site, and the publish button is yours again — quality findings are shown to you rather than used to hold the door shut.

Feature: Connect a domain you own to a published site. Its status comes from actually fetching your domain over HTTPS and checking it serves your site — not from a vendor saying the record looks right
Improvement: You don't get a clickable link to your domain until the certificate is genuinely issued, so you never hand a customer a browser security warning on your own business
Feature: Projects shows a real picture of each live site. A tile that can't be photographed honestly stays blank rather than showing you a stale one
Feature: Archive a project to take the site down — and Undo genuinely undoes it, putting the site back online rather than just restoring a row in a list
Feature: A shareable timelapse of your site being built, offered at the moment it goes live
Improvement: Quality checks now inform rather than veto: you see what we found next to a working publish button. Only three things still stop a publish — an image that never rendered, a page that deploys blank, and a dangerous invented claim about your business
Improvement: Replacing a live custom domain while findings are open asks once and names them, then publishes — a speed bump on the one action that can damage something real, never a block

v2.02026-07-17

Sites that look designed — and never invent facts

Two quality problems fixed at the root rather than papered over. Builds now resolve a proper design system before writing a page, with light-led layouts and headlines that stay legible over photography. And the builder no longer makes things up about your business.

Fix: The builder no longer fabricates authoritative-sounding details — certificate numbers, ratings, award badges, testimonials from customers you don't have. A site can't go live carrying an invented claim about your business
Improvement: Every build resolves a full design system first — palette, type, imagery treatment — so pages look composed rather than assembled
Fix: Light-toned brands get light-toned sites. Builds no longer default to a dark hero with a scrim over it regardless of your palette
Fix: Hero headlines are checked for legibility against the photo behind them on phone and desktop, not just one of the two
Improvement: If a photo didn't generate, one click regenerates just the missing images instead of rebuilding your whole site
Fix: Tools and dashboards are no longer marked down for having few marketing photos — an internal app isn't supposed to look like a brochure

v1.92026-07-15

Edit your live site by clicking it

Changing a word no longer means asking the AI and waiting for a rebuild. Open your published site in Helm, click the text you want to change, type, and publish. Images work the same way — click one and upload your own.

Feature: Click any text on your site to edit it in place, then publish the change straight to your live URL
Feature: Click an image to swap it for your own — including the full-width photo behind a hero, not just inline images
Improvement: Your edits are written back into your site's plan, so a photo you chose yourself survives the next AI rebuild instead of being overwritten

v1.82026-07-13

Builds that finish, and a go-live that connects

A reliability pass on the two moments where a stall costs you the most: the build itself and the publish. An interrupted build now continues from where it stopped instead of starting over, and a page that deploys blank can no longer be reported to you as live.

Fix: A build interrupted partway through resumes where it stopped rather than starting again from nothing
Fix: A long AI turn is no longer mistaken for a stalled build — builds stopped being killed while they were working
Fix: Publish and go-live can no longer spin forever, and a deploy that finishes just outside the polling window is reconciled instead of reported as failed
Feature: A deployed page is loaded and checked before it's called live — a blank or crashed page can't be handed to you as a working site
Integration: Go-live connects Calendly for bookings and Mailchimp for email capture, alongside Stripe for payments
Fix: A publish that fails now says what went wrong, and momentary hosting API blips are tolerated rather than fatal

v1.72026-07-05

Quality checks before your site earns its URL

Helm started checking a build's quality before publishing it — placeholder copy left in, broken images, too little working interactivity — and showing you exactly what it found. (As of v2.1 these findings inform rather than block: you decide when to publish.)

Feature: Publishing runs a quality pass — design, content and functional checks — and reports what it found
Feature: Findings are specific and actionable (e.g. "placeholder copy found"), with one click to send the issue back to the builder
Improvement: A site with a compile error can never receive a public URL

v1.62026-07-05

Hardening before the doors open

A systematic reliability sprint on the quiet failures that don't announce themselves until a real customer hits them — payments, publishing, and the routes that start a build.

Fix: Checkout handles both subscriptions and one-time top-ups — one-time purchases were being dropped
Fix: Sign-in failures show a clear reason instead of silently bouncing you back to the login page
Fix: Asset uploads retry with backoff, so a momentary network blip no longer leaves a publish half-finished
Improvement: Every builder route requires authentication — a guessed URL can't start a build or reach someone else's project

v1.52026-07-05

Accessibility built in, not bolted on

Every page Helm builds meets accessibility standards out of the box. Alt text, form labels, icon buttons and heading order are enforced during the build — so your site works for all of your customers from the first day it's live.

Improvement: Images get meaningful alt text automatically
Improvement: Form labels are wired correctly so screen readers work
Improvement: Icon-only buttons carry accessible labels
Improvement: Heading order is enforced across every generated page
Fix: Security hardening: webhook signature verification and protection against server-side request forgery

v1.42026-07-01

Builds got cheaper to run — and better at search

The builder now reuses its own context across the many turns it takes to write a full site, cutting the cost of a complex build by more than half with no visible difference in the result. Every built site also ships with the metadata search engines and social previews expect.

Improvement: Builder costs cut by more than half through context reuse across the build
Improvement: Page titles, descriptions and social share previews are generated for every site automatically
Improvement: Links out to other sites get security attributes added automatically
Feature: A privacy policy page is generated for any site that collects an email address or phone number
Improvement: Photos persist correctly when a build resumes from a snapshot
Fix: A crashed build unblocks you within 90 seconds instead of holding the project for 12 minutes

v1.32026-06-30

Apps and tools get real depth

Builds that are a tool rather than a brochure used to look complete and behave shallowly. Now every product or app build starts with a shared data layer — so charts show real data, a role switch actually changes what you can see, and a row opens into a full record.

Improvement: App and product builds start with a shared data store before any screen is written
Improvement: Charts are real charts drawn from that data, not styled rectangles
Improvement: Role switching genuinely gates what each role can see and do, rather than just changing a label
Improvement: Rows open into full detail views with history

v1.12026-06-25

Real photography in every build

No more grey placeholder boxes. Every site Helm builds gets real, generated photography sized for the slot it sits in — hero, cards, gallery — chosen to match the business you described.

Feature: Every build gets generated photography at the right size and crop for each slot
Improvement: Imagery is chosen against your brand and your business, not applied as a generic stock pass

v1.02026-06-21

Helm ships: describe your business, get a real site

Helm is live. Answer a short set of questions about your business and Helm builds a production site in a live cloud sandbox — with your brand colours, real content, and a working publish button at the end of it.

Feature: A consultative start: Helm asks about your business rather than handing you a blank template picker
Feature: The builder writes a real, production React site into a live sandbox you can watch as it's built
Feature: Publish to a live URL in one click
Feature: Brand kit crawler: if you already have a site, Helm pulls your existing colours and logo automatically
Integration: Stripe payments wired into the site Helm builds for you