Start here: which way to build

Every site starts from a BYQ template. After that you choose how you want to work, and you can change your mind at any time. All three ways edit the same site and share the same version history.

The three ways

• BYQ's built-in assistant. You answer ten short questions about your business, then keep chatting in your own words. It rewrites the text, pages and photos and shows the result in the live preview. It uses BYQ AI tokens.
• Edit it yourself. Click any text, image or section in the preview and change it. Styling, pages, sections and your CMS items are all done by hand. This is free. A few buttons inside the editor offer an AI helper, and those use tokens.
• Your own AI tool. Connect Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or another MCP tool and ask it to build the site. It runs on the AI plan you already pay for and uses none of your BYQ tokens. It also skips the ten setup questions, so you just tell your tool what you want.

Which one should I pick?

• You want the quickest start and have no AI subscription: use the built-in assistant.
• You only want to change a headline, a photo or the colours: edit it yourself. It costs nothing.
• You already pay for Claude, Cursor or Codex, or you want to keep your BYQ tokens: use your own AI tool.
• You are on the Free plan with a small token balance: edit by hand, or use your own AI tool for the big jobs.

Mixing them

Most people mix. A common pattern is to pick a theme in the Style panel for free, ask an AI to write the pages, fix a word by clicking on it, and come back to the AI for the next big change. Nothing locks you in, and every change is saved as a version you can go back to.

Good to know before you start

• You always start from a template. There is no way to import an existing website into the builder yet.
• Free sites can go live. Every plan can publish on a free your-site.byqsite.com address. A site built through your own AI tool needs Pro or Ultra to go live, or hosting for that one site at $15 a month. Until then you can preview it in the editor.
• Tokens, in one line. The assistant spends tokens, your own AI tool does not, and hand editing is free. The next page shows exactly what falls into each group.

Next: What uses tokens, and what is free.