
Hocoos
Hocoos was an AI website builder for small businesses: eight questions produced a complete site with store, booking, blog and SEO tools. The platform shut down on 23 April 2026 and no longer accepts new users.
What is Hocoos?
Hocoos was an AI website builder published by Komibi Inc., a company based in Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada. Its promise was blunt: a professional website in under five minutes, with no coding and no design work. A visitor answered eight questions about their business, the AI returned three complete site proposals with layout, copy and imagery, and a click-and-edit editor, presented as simpler than drag-and-drop, handled the rest. The company claimed more than 500,000 small businesses as users.
Around that core sat a full product line: an AI Website builder, an AI Store Builder for e-commerce, an AI Blog Builder, an AI Portfolio Builder, a booking website builder and a template library. A separate AI Toolkit added image completion, which could insert elements, remove objects and extend backgrounds, a logo generator producing four options in 3D, geometric or realistic styles, and a content writer for pages, widgets and blog posts.
The subscription bundled the parts a small business usually has to assemble itself: hosting, SSL, backups, DDoS protection, automatic mobile layout, a store with inventory and promotions, an appointment system with staff and calendar management, email campaigns, lead forms and pop-ups, a testimonials app, SEO controls wired to Google Search Console and Google Business Profile, and advertising hooks for Google, Microsoft and Meta. A domain cost 15 dollars a year, free for the first year on the annual plan, and a professional mailbox 2.50 dollars a month. The marketing site was published in seven languages.
None of it is available any more. The pricing page now reads Hocoos is no longer operating, the application at magic.hocoos.com answers that the platform has been discontinued, and the knowledge base gives 23 April 2026 as the official shutdown date. A thirty-day window let customers export a static HTML copy of their site, their media and their store, booking and mailing data. Subscriptions were cancelled automatically with pro-rata refunds, domains had to be moved to a personal Name.com account and mailboxes to Polaris Mail.
What it does
- Generate a complete website from an eight-question business questionnaire
- Propose three ready-to-publish design options and edit them by clicking any element
- Write page copy, widget text and blog articles with an AI content co-writer
- Build an online store with products, inventory, promotions and PayPal or Stripe checkout
- Run a 24/7 booking system with synced calendar, staff, locations and client records
- Generate logos and edit images by adding elements, removing objects or extending backgrounds
- Publish with hosting, SSL, a custom domain and built-in SEO and email marketing
When to use Hocoos / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Hocoos is the right fit.
When to use Hocoos
- Small business owners with no coding or design skills who needed a credible website quickly
- Freelancers and independent consultants building a first professional presence online
- Local service providers such as car repair shops, home services, salons and gyms, for whom the site published ready-made industry layouts
- Course creators, tutors and coaches who needed booking, payments and a blog in one subscription
- Former Hocoos customers who still need to export their website files, transfer a domain or claim a refund
When not to use Hocoos
- Anyone starting a new website today: the platform is discontinued and no longer accepts sign-ups
- Developers looking for an API, a headless workflow or developer documentation, none of which Hocoos ever published
- Teams with formal compliance requirements: no DPA, no subprocessor list, no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, and the site never mentions the GDPR by name
- Organisations that need mobile apps or a self-hosted deployment, neither of which existed
- Users who need to keep interactive features after leaving: the export produces a static HTML copy in which forms, booking, checkout and integrations stop working
How to use Hocoos
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Answer eight questions about the business and its goals, announced as under two minutes
- Let the AI generate three complete website proposals with design, copy and images
- Pick one proposal, or start instead from the ready-made template library
- Click any element in the editor and choose among AI-generated suggestions to adjust it
- Add images from the built-in library, from a computer, or from a phone by scanning a QR code
- Generate a logo, rewrite paragraphs or produce blog articles with the AI toolkit
- Add the store, booking system, blog or portfolio modules as needed
- Connect an existing domain or buy one through Hocoos, then publish
- Wire up SEO, email campaigns, live chat and advertising accounts
- Since the shutdown, only one step remains: log in before the deadline to download the exported site files
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No coding or design skill required: a complete site came out of an eight-question questionnaire
- Genuinely all-in-one for a small business, from store and bookings to email marketing and SEO
- Single readable price with no feature tiers: 15 dollars a month or 150 dollars a year, integrations included at no extra cost
- 14-day free trial plus a no-questions-asked 14-day money-back guarantee
- Annual plan included a free domain for the first year and a free professional mailbox
- Hosting, SSL, backups and security handled entirely by the vendor
- Orderly shutdown: thirty days' notice, full data export, automatic pro-rata refunds and transfer guides
Cons
- The platform is discontinued: sites went offline and accounts and data were scheduled for permanent deletion after 23 April 2026
- The export is a static copy only, so forms, booking, checkout and third-party integrations stop working
- No public API, no developer documentation and no mobile app ever existed
- No Data Processing Agreement, no subprocessor list and no published security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001
- The GDPR is never mentioned anywhere on the site, and no Article 27 EU representative is designated
- Terms section 3.6.2 states plainly that no opt-out from third-party analytics is offered
- The homepage still advertises the offer and its prices while the pricing page announces the shutdown, with no warning banner anywhere
Pricing & Plans
Hocoos offered a 14-day free trial at no cost rather than a permanent free plan, although the homepage FAQ contradicted its own pricing table on this point. The cheapest paid entry point was the Premium monthly plan at 15.00 USD per month, with an annual alternative at 150.00 USD per year. Optional extras were a domain at 15 USD per year and a professional mailbox at 2.50 USD per month. These amounts are taken from the pricing section still displayed on the homepage; the pricing page itself now carries the shutdown notice instead of a price table, and no plan can be purchased any more.
- build and launch a professional site
- AI-generated design
- click-and-edit editor
- automatic mobile optimisation
- marketing integrations
- online payments
- custom domain connection
- access to all features
- everything in Premium monthly
- plus a free domain for one year (stated value 15 USD) and a free professional mailbox
- domain at 15 USD per year
- professional mailbox at 2.50 USD per month
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Hocoos handles your data.
GDPR overview
The GDPR is never named anywhere on the site: a search across every archived page, text and HTML alike, returns no occurrence of the regulation. What the privacy notice does provide is a rights section covering access, correction, deletion, restriction of processing and portability, exercised at privacy@hocoos.com, and a designated Data Protection Officer reachable at the same address and at the Ontario postal address. Complaints go to the same mailbox. International transfers are said to rely on a valid transfer mechanism under applicable law, but no mechanism is named. The minimum age is thirteen, raised to sixteen inside the European Union. No Article 27 EU representative is designated, no Data Processing Agreement is offered, and Do Not Track signals are not honoured.
Who owns the data?
Customers keep ownership of their content. Section 4.1 of the terms grants Hocoos only a worldwide, non-exclusive licence to host, copy and use Customer Data as needed to deliver the service, and states that the customer or their licensors retain all rights and ownership. Internal policies are said to limit employee access to that content. Personal information is shared with third-party vendors, subsidiaries and affiliated companies, auditors and advisers, and the privacy notice states that it is never rented or sold. One exception cuts the other way: under section 7.2, any feedback a customer sends becomes a royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable licence for Hocoos.
Reuse rights
Customers may reuse their own content freely, since they never transfer ownership of it, and they may delete their account at any time. Hocoos reserves broader rights over the data it collects. Section 3.6.1 of the terms lets it use Customer Data on an aggregated and anonymised basis to improve service performance and to develop additional related solutions. Section 3.6.2 lets it collect Account Data for monitoring, statistics, diagnostics, comparative analysis, security and billing, and hands it to third-party analytics providers. That last point comes with an unusually blunt condition: Hocoos states that no opt-out is offered, and that a customer who disagrees should simply not register. Nothing on the site says whether customer content was ever used to train AI models. Payment data is not handled in-house; it goes to Stripe, PayPal and PayPro Global. Since the shutdown, all stored websites and data are scheduled for permanent deletion.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The privacy notice states that Hocoos stored and processed personal information in the EU and the United States, including on infrastructure operated and maintained by cloud hosting providers in the United States. No specific country, region, data centre or hosting provider is named beyond that sentence, and no subprocessor list is published anywhere on the site. International transfers are said to rely on a valid transfer mechanism as provided for by applicable law, but the mechanism is never identified: standard contractual clauses are not cited, nor is any adequacy decision. The publishing company, Komibi Inc., is based in Etobicoke, Ontario, and the terms of use are governed by the laws of Ontario, Canada, with jurisdiction in the Ontario courts, so the jurisdiction of the contract and the jurisdictions of the data do not coincide. Network checks show the site itself served from Cloudflare's anycast network, which describes the front end rather than where customer data lived. Since the April 2026 shutdown, all data stored on Hocoos servers was scheduled for permanent deletion.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Hocoos.
- The platform is closed: do not start a new project on it, and do not trust the homepage, which still advertises plans that cannot be bought
- Former customers who missed the export window lost their site, their media and their store, booking and mailing data permanently
- An exported site is static: forms, bookings, checkout and every integration stop working, which can silently break a live business flow
- A domain purchased through Hocoos is lost unless it was transferred to a personal Name.com account; mailboxes had to move to Polaris Mail
- The terms state that no opt-out from third-party analytics is offered, and the only alternative proposed is not to register at all
- Liability is capped at the lesser of 100 US dollars or the fees paid over the previous twelve months, which is negligible against the value of a business website
- Relying on a single hosted builder for a company's entire online presence concentrates the risk: a vendor shutdown takes the site, the store, the bookings and the mailing list with it
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Setup required no technical skill. Eight questions produced a full site, the editor worked by clicking elements rather than dragging them, mobile layouts were generated automatically, and hosting, SSL and security were handled by the vendor. Connecting an existing domain or buying one was built in, and advertising tools were wired up with an account ID or through Google Tag Manager. The only genuinely technical step left today is the migration one: re-uploading exported HTML files to a static host and repointing DNS, which the company itself says needs basic knowledge of HTML, CSS or a website editor.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Hocoos
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hocoos still working?
What happened to websites published with Hocoos?
Could customers recover their website?
Does an exported Hocoos site still work?
What happens to subscriptions and payments?
What happens to a domain bought through Hocoos?
How much did Hocoos cost?
What was the minimum age to use Hocoos?
Where was customer data hosted?
Who published Hocoos?
Should you pick Hocoos?
Hocoos answered a real problem well. A small business owner with no technical skill could answer eight questions and walk away with a credible website, a store, a booking calendar and an email list, all under one flat subscription of 15 dollars a month with no feature tiers to decode. The click-and-edit approach, the AI logo and image tools, and the seven-language interface made it genuinely accessible, and the support was the single thing customers praised most often in the testimonials the company published.
That verdict is now historical. Komibi Inc. discontinued the platform on 23 April 2026. The editor and dashboard were switched off, published sites went dark, and accounts and stored data were slated for permanent deletion. The company handled the closure decently: thirty days' notice, a full export of site files and business data, automatic pro-rata refunds within one to two business days, and step-by-step guides for moving domains to Name.com and mailboxes to Polaris Mail. What the export cannot carry over is the interactive half of the product, since forms, bookings, checkout and integrations all depended on Hocoos servers.
Two reservations survive the shutdown and are worth recording. The first is compliance: no Data Processing Agreement, no subprocessor list, no published security certification, no named EU representative, and not a single mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site, alongside a terms clause stating flatly that no opt-out from third-party analytics is available. The second is the site itself, which still sells the product and its prices on the homepage while the pricing page announces the closure. Anyone landing on hocoos.com today should treat the marketing pages as stale.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.