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Free .com.au Domain + 6 Months Hosting with AI Website Builder (One Claim Per ABN, Limit 1,000) @ Zarla

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OZBARGAIN20250221

Launch Your Aussie Website in 60 seconds for $0!

Get a Free .com.au domain (1 year) + 6 months of web hosting with Zarla’s AI website builder. No lock-in; cancel anytime. Valid until 31 Mar or 1,000 sign-ups.

Zarla – an AI website builder – is offering a free .com.au domain name registration plus 6 months of free website hosting for new users. Essentially, you can build and host a website with your own .com.au domain at no cost for six months.

What is Included:

  • Free 1 year .com.au domain (registered to you and paid for by Zarla).
  • Free hosting for 6 months on Zarla’s AI website builder platform (create and publish your site, no fees of any kind for the first six months).

After 6 Months: If you continue using the service, it costs $9 USD per month after the initial 6-month free period. Heads-up: $9 USD is roughly ~$14 AUD per month (at current exchange rates). You can cancel anytime before the 6 months is up to avoid being charged. There is no lock-in contract.

What happens to my domain if I cancel before 6 months? You can take your domain with you at no-cost or just let it expire if you do not need it.

Requirements/Conditions:

  • Use promotion code OZBARGAIN20250221 at checkout to claim the offer. It is only valid on our monthly plan.
  • Credit card required at sign-up – No charge now, but the system requires a card to activate the free trial (and for automatic billing after 6 months if you don’t cancel). We will email you before billing starts so you can cancel if you do not want to pay.
  • To register a .com.au you need an ABN. ACN, BN, or trademark number are also accepted.
  • Limit one domain per ABN – You can only claim this deal once per ABN/business (one free domain and hosting package).
  • Offer ends Mar 31, 2025 or after 1,000 redemptions (whichever comes first) – this is a limited-time promotion. You must sign up and claim your free domain by that date. After 31/03/2025 or 1,000 redemptions, the free domain + 6mo hosting offer won’t be available to new signups.

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Comments

  • +1

    Launch Your Aussie Website in 60 seconds

    Incorrect, I'm with Dodo for internet 😁

    • 🦤

      • Is this your business?

        • Yes, I am one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions you have here or [email protected]

          • +2

            @Zarla: How are you going to manage with OzBargainers signing up just for a free domain and cancelling straight away? This would take a good hit to your promotions budget…

            • +1

              @freeb1e4me: That's exactly what is going to happen.

              These aren't regular people you're advertising to, these are… OzBargainers.

              • +1

                @besttechadvisor: Hah. Yes, hence the 1,000 redemption limit. I am sure there is some domainer out there with 1,000 ABN about to signup :)

                • +1

                  @Zarla:

                  I am sure there is some domainer out there with 1,000 ABN about to signup

                  Hi…

                  • @jv: 🧛

            • +2

              @freeb1e4me: We expect there will be some people who just want a free domain so that is perfectly fine and we have budgeted for that. This is a loss leader for us similar to GoDaddy and their $0.99 .com domains they have been doing for decades. If we get 1,000 people off the couch to kickstart their business website we will be very happy.

          • @Zarla:

            Yes, I am one of the flounders.

            🐟

            • +1

              @jv:

              Yes, I am one of the flounders.
              🐟

              Seems fishy.

  • +1

    Whats included in the hosting? space, ram, etc ?

    • +1

      We are a bit different from a normal hosting company. You can signup and create a site for free to see how it works. It is more for people that need a simple one page website with a lead form vs a full Wordpress style website. Definitely more for the non-tech types or someone who just wants to get a site launched and get back to working on the business.

  • Cool website OP

    • Cheers. Thanks for the feedback :)

  • A few questions…

    • Is the $9USD/$14AUD including GST?

    • Does this include email hosting?

    • What is the phone number for support?

    • +1

      Good questions:
      - We are a US company so no GST at this point.
      - We do offer email forwarding from [email protected] to [email protected] I didn't include that in the deal description as it is more a temporary thing. For proper email hosting nearly all our clients use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 which looks more professional. Email hosting is a whole business we don't really want to get into.
      - We are a small team, our product isn't complex, and phone support is costly so we do not offer it. Live chat and email only for now. It is also hard to do phone support well and many problems cannot be solved in a phone call. We will review it though if it becomes a necessity.

        • Thanks for pointing that out. We use Stripe Tax to monitor our tax thresholds. https://docs.stripe.com/tax/supported-countries/asia-pacific… We only just launched in Australia so Stripe is saying we are below the threshold for GST registration at this stage. I think there is also some exemption for sales made to businesses as they can supply an ABN so we do not have to charge GST. That covers most of our business here as you need an ABN to get a .com.au anyway.

          Our accountant keeps an eye on all this as she loves dealing with complex international taxation issues and we are always thrilled to have to register in 80 jurisdictions and remit sales taxes.

          • @Zarla: Great, seems like you’re all over it. Personally I think it’s a rather silly law, just wanted to let you know about it.

        • +1

          It's really interesting how a business would not know that since ABN is required for a .com.au website, they must also charge GST to every single customer unless they are Australian GST-registered businesses that are buying for business use. This is more info for the US company selling to businesses in Australia: https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/internat…

          • +2

            @twocsies: It is odd that the article does not mention that you have to exceed $75k in sales per year before you have to register. The video does spell it out though and that matches what we see in Stripe. When we get close to the threshold we get the accountant to look into it to make sure we are compliant.

          • @twocsies:

            unless they are Australian GST-registered businesses that are buying for business use

            That's 99% of people eligible for a .com.au domain.

            • @skwashd: You only need an ABN. GST is completely separate, and you could easily make the argument that people looking for a service like this are likely either very small or just starting out and are more likely to not be GST registered as they are under the threshold.

  • Got error: We don't currently offer .com.au domains.

    • Can you email me on [email protected] or DM me. I cannot see a chat or domain request that might match the error you are seeing.

    • @man2000 may have found where you got stuck. Go into our website builder at https://www.zarla.com and you should end up at https://app.zarla.com which is the website builder. Our team can sort you out with the domain request there.

  • https://domains.zarla.com/site/availability/news.com.au
    "We don't currently offer .com.au domains."
    image.png

    • Ah. That is a different section of the site for the US market. Go into our website builder at https://www.zarla.com and you should end up at https://app.zarla.com which is the website builder. Our team can sort you out with the domain request there.

  • -1

    ozbargian.com.au is available…

    I'm thinking about starting up a bargain site for dyslexic bargainers.
    A segment of the market that is often overlooked…

  • Just signed up, something I wanted to do for a while, might help me save time at the moment as I don’t yet have to time to work out how to create a website.

    Having 6 months free will be extremely handy to give me time to work out how I would like and build it.

    So I’ll see how I go.
    Thanks

    • Welcome and thank you. This is exactly why we built Zarla.

  • Hi OP, I'm quite noob at this as I have a squarespace website but the domain is expiring soon. Will I be able to transfer it to Zarla (just the domain)?

    • +1

      Yes, we can help you update the records. First signup with us to get the website ready and then chat with the support team and we can show you what to do. It is pretty easy. https://support.zarla.com/en/articles/8801957-using-a-domain… gives you all the steps you need but our team have to know what domain you are bringing in so we can set our end up to receive it.

  • Hi OP (@Zarla)
    Can I register this for myself (I have ABN) and create a subdomain (and use its A.I. capabilities) for my family (e.g. my kids), to give them a bit of flavour of web designing and A.I. in general?

    Thanks

    • +1

      Cool idea. I am fairly sure it will be possible to do that as long as your family use different emails so you all have an individual account with us. Each account can only have one domain. We can then set up all the subdomains correctly so you have child1.example.com and child2.example.com If our support team doesn't understand your request let me know and I can help out.

      We also have free sites that are like child1.zarlasites.com which do not require a credit card to setup at all so that is another option.

      • Oh cool! good to know that you have free sites option too - that potentially works for my kids… so you can save your promotion for the real company that need it the most…

        • +1

          Little do you know one of your kids is probably the next Warren Buffet…

  • Hey, can I get the hosting package but use my own custom domain? Thanks

    • Once you have finished customising your site on Zarla just let our support team know you want to bring your own domain over. They have guides for most of the major providers to show you which records to change. Once the records have been changed it can take a day or so for the switch to happen. it is usually in a couple of hours depending on how quick the ISP's update their DNS records.

      • Cool, thanks. Is there any way to add e-commerce?

        • We wouldn't be a great fit if you are doing an online store as we have no eCommerce capabilities at all. We do have a bunch of clients who have www.example.com with us and shop.example.com with something like https://woocommerce.com but it is not the norm.

  • Got plenty of cool sites live already:

    • Protea farm
    • Collectibles (TCG, figures, lego sets)
    • Children's books
    • IT solutions/consulting
    • Tutoring
    • SEO consultant
    • Courier
    • French bulldog breeder
    • Even a few web developers
    • can you link us some websites that you are hosting?

      • +1

        https://www.skilledbr.com.au here is an older one that already gave us approval to share their site. I like this one as they put a lot of effort into the image gallery. I will see if any other local ones are happy for us to share them. Our sites are fairly simple and straightforward one pagers. We are not trying to be a Wordpress as that need is already well catered for.

        • Awesome!! I have a basic business that just needs a website so it can direct people to my store. This looks perfect for my use case!!

      • +1

        https://www.rejuvecollective.com this is another local one we love.

  • Once you made the website how do you register the domain?

    • +1

      There should be a live chat you can start in the app to ask our team to get it registered for you. We have to do this step manually for the .com.au You can speed up the process by sending them the exact domain you want, your full name, company name, ABN, address, and phone number and they will get it all done for you and pointed at the new website. If live chat is not showing up then email [email protected] and they will sort you out.

  • Will you be implementing e-commerce features in the future?

    • E-commerce is a complex product offering and there is already a bunch of good solutions in the market. Our focus is on smaller service based businesses that want a simple website vs product based businesses who need to sell online.

  • It's truly impressive how quickly it can output a template site!

    Can you share what exactly what your sites are built with, framework, css, etc?

    The above: https://www.skilledbr.com.au/ is getting 96 on page insights for desktop 👍, but 77 for mobile - given this is literally your own template with 0 customisation, how come?

    Are you planning more features/options for customising content/designs/templates?

    EDIT: The site it just generated - "Core Web Vitals Assessment: Failed", again, given it's a template - what gives?

    • EDIT: The core vitals error was coz it wasn't published yet, my bad. My live site was somewhat better than the prior.

      So there's clearly only 1 page layout, which is AI populated with text and stock images drawn from the categories one chooses. This has great potential if you were using a framework behind the scenes (think: tailwind css) and could then provide a decent number of distinct options, at no overhead/server cost to you.
      But 1 layout - meaning every single customer site is the same? Yeah, nah.

      ISSUES ON FIRST TINKER:

      1. When logged in, 'My sites' and I click 'new site' or 'create a new one' it logs me out and takes me to homepage. It seems you've got to pay for more than one site? Fair enough, but nothing whatsoever to clarify this.

      2. Discovered there's no way to unpublish site, yet you can regenerate, which actually creates a new site (contradicting above) and a note at top, on the 3rd try "Your previous website still exists here but is no longer your primary website", on the 2nd it still ways. This def needs work guys!

      3. Given 2, and that I'd put my biz name in, oops, I then needed to remove it to avoid SEO issues. So I edited biz name but this does NOT change it in all places, only most. Went through manually ensuring it wasn't on page, coz I couldn't unpublish, or delete the page. Yeesh.

      • +1

        We will be adding more layouts and multi-page soon. Possibly some booking button to book a service time. The current one you see is the layout that works for most service based businesses. Our users are very low-tech so they want something very simple and easy to use. If you look at service business websites they all largely have the exact same content blocks:
        - Menu bar with phone number
        - Hero image
        - Some intro text
        - Services blocks
        - Image gallery
        - Reviews
        - Contact form

        The order may change but they are very similar. A restaurant would want a very different template and we are not a fit for them.

        Issues:
        1. The log out issue shouldn't be happening so I will get the dev team to look into that. Multi-site is something new we did so it has some bugs still.
        2. Unpublish is not yet live. We have to do it manually as we found clients accidentally unpublished their sites and did not realise.
        3. If you regenerate your site with a new business name it should not have any of the old name in it. If you are just editing the one site the name will be in lots of raw text fields with other text so we currently have no special treatment there. It is a good idea though to have it easy to change.

        • No argument re the blocks, strong argument for needing different themes/layouts/styles.
          I can see something approaching this at: https://www.zarla.com/website-templates , but between my 4 regenerations I only got 1 style. It'd make sense to have a very limited number of layouts that users could choose from, think even 3 or 4 layout style categories, with multiple differing css within each of those cat's, and then the further customisation options in the editor.
          This is where it gets tricky tho - how much is too much for yr target audience?
          As u might tell I've spent quite some time on these product challenges myself, with differing positioning/USP ideas.


          Yeah 1 and 2 are FUBAR right now my friend.

          1. Regenerate worked as expected (apart from it creating a new site, and new site logging me out, both made no sense), I was referring to edit/edit biz name, it changed it in most places, not all places. If you Zarla generate it, u should be able to change it, this is clearly a functional bug.
        • @zarla
          Did I have to put in my CC to take advantage of deal, and hence I will be charged in 6 mths?

          Yet there's no account details whatsoever, option to cancel account/delete/current plan?

          • @nessism: The billing portal is not actually accessible until you subscribe which is why you cannot find it. Let me know if you did subscribe though and cannot access the billing portal.

            We do need a credit card to activate the deal and we will be emailing before the 6 months ends so people are aware billing is about to start. You can remove your card from the billing portal if you prefer or use a $1 gift card. We use Stripe billing as a fully hosted option so it is pretty simple to use and you have full control over it.

            • @Zarla: The billing portal is not accesible, but I can remove my card?

              Yes, I want to remove my card.

              • @nessism: https://support.zarla.com/en/articles/8546390-how-do-i-cance… this is another way for you to get to the billing portal. Click on the link in the first paragraph, verify the same email you used to pay, and you will get a temporary session you can use to manage the billing. This only works if you have a subscription and only if the email is the exact same one you used to checkout.

                I have our dev team looking into why the Billing link is not showing inside the More button in the dashboard. I expect it is something around how we have this OzBargain special deal setup that is not switching the button to be visible.

                To clarify about removing your card. This only seems to be possible for us to do in the Stripe admin dashboard. It is not possible for a customer to delete the only payment method so you have no payment methods. You can add an additional one then delete the old one.

                If you want to remove all payment methods you can ask our support to remove it and your subscription can remain active and will cancel automatically when the billing fails in 6 months.

    • +1

      Thanks for the feedback.

      Our dev team are offline but I believe our sites are built using React with TypeScript for component-based development, and we manage styling using CSS‑in‑JS (specifically with styled‑components).

      We did do some early work on making sure the sites load decently fast. This is easier on desktop. For mobile there is some more changes we will have coming soon that should get the score up. We already deployed some of those to our main www.zarla.com site which is a totally different stack but you can see the increase in speed at https://cruxvis.withgoogle.com/#/?view=cwvsummary&url=https%… compared to what it was before. Mainly around compressing some of the images to make them smaller and serving them in newer formats like AVIF/JXL/WEBP etc.

      Some parts of the client site like the html are not actually cached at present so that edits are instantly live. We do cache the images/css properly. Once we turn on html caching that should improve the speed again. When using Pagespeed on cached sites that are low traffic you need to run it dozens of times before you will get a pagespeed score where it has hit the same edge CDN node twice. We can see the pagespeed bot changing locations all the time so it is hard to get a real world best CDN speed example.

      I will answer your features question in your other comment.

      • Nice, thanks for detail 👍

  • Is there a way I can upload my own website created on canva professional to this deal?

    • Not really. Our system has some fixed templates you have to use where you upload the images and edit the text. You cannot upload a html file like you would on a normal website hosting provider. Canva websites have their own hosting built in you can use there I thought. If you are a bit more technical and have the raw html you can use many of the simple hosting options like https://tiiny.host/pricing or https://render.com/docs/static-sites or https://pages.cloudflare.com

  • +1

    Seems very manual at the moment. Ticket to register domain, unpublish website and cancel subscription..?

    I made some sites to test generation etc and am wierded out by the lack of an account/main page or even a hamburger menu + needing to lodge a ticket to do any kind of management.

    • Yeah just noticed that myself, commented above. "Suss" might be more appropriate.

      • Given their target demographic of small business owner who aren't techy.. you might even say it's predatory.

        Honestly not even the dirtiest way to get customers I've seen from startups.

        • I am guessing you are talking about the recurring billing semi-scams out there where the whole business is built on charging small amounts that people do not notice on their card?

          Silent billing really doesn't work as long-term play. Clients eventually notice the $9 charges they forgot about and go and do a mass dispute on them which costs us $9 + $15 dispute fee for every charge which is non-refundable even if we won the dispute. If we win we get the $9 back but we are still negative $6 due to the dispute fee. As a merchant you almost always lose these disputes so I have never fully understood how sites get away with it. Then, if you get too many disputes VISA and Mastercard stick your account on review and the banks also monitor for sneaky merchants and start blocking charges so you cannot get new clients.

          The disputes we have had are nearly all fraud (9 out of 13 since we started) most we refunded before we got the dispute notification but the dispute bounced the refund. The other 4 were clients who were on a yearly renewal and did not action the renewal reminder email we sent and disputed the renewal without giving us a chance to refund it. This is common as some US banks make it easy to do one click disputes. We just accept them and move on as it isn't worth fighting those.

          • +1

            @Zarla: Are you saying you've been this for over a year and you still don't have a working client portal, etc, etc? Seriously?

    • We are gradually automating more common tasks. Our standard client needs a decent amount of guidance so we often step in to do things manually for them. There is a full billing section hosted by Stripe which allows full control over that side where you can cancel or remove card payment details without any manual requests.

      Domain management is complex and most of our clients do not understand what an A record of CNAME is so we are doing that manually for now. I am not sure that will change to a self-service option as our clients have shown little interest in being able to play with DNS settings themselves.

      When you register your domain with us you can request the registrar login details so you can manage that side and take your domain off our DNS and add your own records back in if you prefer. You can also asked for it to be unlocked so you can transfer the domain to a new registrar entirely,

    • https://support.zarla.com/en/articles/8546390-how-do-i-cance… this is another way for you to get to the billing portal. Click on the link in the first paragraph, verify the same email you used to pay, and you will get a temporary session you can use to manage the billing. This only works if you have a subscription and only if the email is the exact same one you used to checkout.

      I have our dev team looking into why the Billing link is not showing inside the More button in the dashboard. I expect it is something around how we have this OzBargain special deal setup that is not switching the button to be visible.

  • @Zarla any way to change the components? i.e. can't find a way to remove the mobile number from the website without removing the entire header/section, would ideally like to change it to an email

    • Not currently. We have some new features coming soon that will give you more control over this. Most of our clients are service based businesses who want their phone number prominently displayed. The contact form at the bottom of the page will go direct to your email. If you do not want to put your mobile phone on the site I would register a VoIP number in the local area and redirect that to your phone. If you do not want any calls at all you can drop it into voicemail but having a phone number on the site will help with your Google rank especially for people doing "X near me" type searches.

  • Hi,
    Your support is completely nightmare and information for transfer the domain is manually which is completely unexpected in this time where you are asking people for ai 30 sec website. I am chasing up your support for the information but they are unable provide proper information.

    • Can you email some more detail on [email protected] as it seems they are misunderstanding what you are requesting. Domain transfer we have to manually unlock but only takes a few seconds to do unless there is some other issue. We have lock on to make https://icannwiki.org/Domain_Slamming harder to do.

      • Locking a domain name is not something that's available as a nonpaid product we've .au domain names it's called (.auLOCKDOWN) and is an additional charge to registrars which is typically passed on to the end user.

        Also domain slamming is not something that's actually relevant here in Australia because when it last became a problem here we removed registration and renewal dates from public facing WHOIS and that information is now only available to registrants.

    • I think I may have found your ticket. I let our support team know that the offer of 6 months free hosting is also available for people who are bringing their own domain to us. We were not expecting many people to want to bring a domain in as we normally work with clients who have no domain and are starting from scratch.

      Let me know if that was not the right ticket though.

    • If you're still having issues AdelaideDeals, you can retrieve the domain password for transfer using the registry tool available here on the official auDA website and move the domain name for free to any registrar, preferably one listed here on the wiki

  • Hey, trying to apply the promo code in the checkout but I get an error?

    • Fixed in PM. looked to be a payment error.

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