Compare
What it costs to be seen.
Most design galleries charge you to be considered. We checked what they actually ask, read from their own submission pages rather than from anyone's summary.
All figures checked 1 September 2026. Prices move, so this page is dated rather than left to go quietly out of date. Where a gallery does not publish a price, we say that instead of guessing one.
| Gallery | To submit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Awwwards | $65 per website | $165 bundles one year of Pro. Memberships run $6.70, $13.80 and $324 a month and buy 30% off submissions. |
| CSS Design Awards | $50 per site | |
| CSS Winner | not published | Charges for submission; the amount is not shown on a page we could reach. |
| The FWA | not published | Submission page carries no visible price. |
| Orpetron | not published | Submit page renders client-side and shows no price to a visitor or a crawler. |
| CSS Light | not published | Offers paid and free routes; the paid amount is not published where we could read it. |
| CSS Crème | Free always | No submission fee, no membership, no account. Editorial selection only. |
Sources, in order of confidence: a gallery's own rendered submission page first; "not published" means we loaded that page in a real browser and no price was visible to a visitor. 4 of the 6 galleries here do not show what they charge.
The part worth noticing
The gap is not really 65 dollars against nothing. It is that a paid gate selects for whoever has a marketing budget, and then calls the result the best work on the web. Those are different things, and the second one quietly becomes a claim about taste that was actually a claim about spending.
The other half is that 4 of these galleries will not tell you the price before you start. We can publish ours in one word because it is the same word for everybody.
Two other things we counted
Measured across 18 galleries and award sites on 1 September 2026 by
reading each homepage, robots.txt and llms.txt. Counts we took ourselves.
ship no structured data
No JSON-LD on the homepage at all, so search engines get no machine-readable description of what the site is. We publish Organization, WebSite with a search action, breadcrumbs, and a type per page. Unglamorous, and checkable in a browser's view-source.
are blocking AI crawlers
SiteInspire and Behance block 13 named agents each; Orpetron and Recent block 7; One Page Love blocks 2. We allow every one of them, publish an llms-full.md and an ai.txt, and run a free MCP server. Being cited is the goal here, not a leak to plug.
publish a design system
Every gallery in the set shows you the work. Not one hands you the tokens, the measured contrast or an installable theme. That is the whole difference: they show, we let you take it apart.
Submitting here
Free, no account, and editorial. A link back is appreciated and never required for consideration. If you want to know whether your site is ready before you send it, point the decoder at it first and read the same numbers we would.