Last month I needed a signup page for a weekend ceramics workshop — 12 seats, first come first served, and I wanted to drop the link into three group chats and a Discord. The catch: every builder I tried either gated the page behind "sign in to view" or handed me a URL that only rendered inside their own app. A friend shoved me toward HTML Studio, the web-page workspace in x-rush. Five minutes later I had a live link that opened for anyone. Here's the exact path, buttons and all.
The problem, stated plainly
I run small in-person workshops. My marketing is, charitably, "I tell people in chats." So when I need a page, I need one thing above all: a URL that just works for whoever clicks it. Not "works if they register." Works.
Most "free landing page" tools fail this in one of two ways. Either the published link throws a login wall (because free tier equals gated), or it's a preview link that breaks the moment you close the tab. I burned a Saturday on two of them before asking around. The answer came back the same each time: try HTML Studio on x-rush. So I did.
Step 1: Pick a starting point
Open /workbench/text/html. The workspace is keyed to one accent color: #00D4AA, a teal on every active tab and button. Sounds cosmetic, but it confirms you're in the right place.
You get two routes. Templates is a curated set of starting points the platform maintains: cards you can search and filter, preview full-screen across desktop, tablet, and phone widths, then fork. Forking calls no AI and spends no credits; you pick the project it lands in and get an independent workspace with the code already loaded. Create from Scratch is the one-sentence route: a name, optional tags, and a plain-language brief. No page-type pickers, no feature checkboxes. The first AI run from this form costs a flat 0.5 credits, and billing checks first: short balance or refused task means the brief stays in the box, no workspace appears, nothing is charged.
If the brief box sits there empty, two helper buttons can seed it: one for ideas, one for tightening wording. Both fill the same box; the result is yours to edit. For the workshop I went template anyway: previewed a product-page card, checked the phone width, hit fork. The workspace opened straight into the editor. No loading theater.
Step 2: Make it yours
The desktop editor has four zones: a file tree on the left (new files, image uploads, right-click to rename or delete), Monaco in the center — the same engine VS Code uses, so muscle memory carries over — an AI panel on the right, and a live preview tracking your draft. Drafts save themselves continuously; there is no save button to forget.
Uploads can also be kept in your account media library (500 MB) for reuse across projects.
I clicked the headline placeholder, typed "Wheel-Throwing Weekend," and watched the preview keep up. That's the small hit that keeps you going: you stop wondering whether it will render and just type.
Then the part I always dread, a signup form. I typed into the AI panel: "add a signup form below the hero — name, email, seat count 1 to 2 per booking, validate email, submit shows a confirmation."
The assistant read my current file first, then answered with a proposal: the change as a diff, green for added, red for removed, the way git displays it. Nothing had changed yet. Code only moves when you press the confirm button, and that button carries the price: 0.5 credits, the same flat rate every run. I read the diff, pressed it, and the form appeared in the preview with working email validation. Questions and idea requests never touch code; they count toward a shared allowance where every 10 successful assists cost 0.5 credits. The tally follows you; a fresh chat doesn't reset it.
Didn't like the field spacing on a follow-up run? Each paid run keeps a one-shot restore point, and one Undo returns the code to exactly where it stood before that run. It's not a general time machine, just a net under the edit you just paid for.
One check before celebrating: the error count on the preview. Anything above zero gets fixed first, because one uncaught error can quietly kill the scripts below it without showing.
Step 3: Publish, and the part that actually mattered
Publishing asks one question first: should the page also appear in the x-rush community, or exist only as a link? Either way it passes an automatic safety review before it goes live. Then a toast, and a link on the x-rush.ai domain.
The page itself runs in a bare shell with a small x-rush.ai footer; that is the only platform chrome on it. I opened the link in an incognito window: no login. It opened on a friend's phone. It rendered inline in the Discord, and because it's plain HTML I embedded it in an iframe inside a Notion doc for the studio calendar.
Two details that sold me on staying:
- Take it down, republish later, the address doesn't change. When the first run filled, I pulled the page so the link wouldn't show a sold-out form forever. A week later I ran it again, hit publish, and the original link, already pinned in three chats, just worked. No "update your bookmarks" message to 40 people.
- Version history keeps every publish, not the last ten. Each publish creates an immutable version, and they all stay. The public link only ever shows the current version, so visitors can't A/B your page; older versions are yours, in your history, to preview and republish. Republishing an old version moves the public address onto it and leaves your current draft untouched. I bungled the button colors once, opened the history, and republished the previous version in a minute.
Pro tips I picked up the hard way
- Read the diff before you confirm. Every confirmed AI run is a fresh 0.5 credits, and the one-shot Undo covers only that run. Cheap, not free.
- Switching templates with unsaved edits forces a choice: save, discard, or cancel.
- Build on desktop. On a phone the workspace opens as a full-screen chat: describe the change, confirm the priced run, then use Preview and Publish at the top. There's no file tree or code editor on mobile. Fine for tweaks; wrong for building.
- Remix other people's pages. Community pages fork — unless the author switched Remix off — into a project you own as an independent workspace. The copy starts from a blank conversation and carries no link back to the original, which protects the source author as much as it hands you a head start.
- Export whenever you like. The current draft packs into a ZIP, free, no credits. It doesn't re-import, so treat it as a backup, not a sync.
What it won't do (yet)
No custom domains for now: the page lives on an x-rush.ai address. No backend either: what you publish is browser-side HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It can call public HTTPS APIs from the visitor's browser, but there's nowhere to stash a secret key, so keep credentials out of the code. A workspace runs one AI task at a time; parallel runs depend on your plan, 1 on Free up to 3 on Pro.
What's actually generating the page
One paragraph, because it matters and nobody explains it. x-rush routes each task to a text model that suits it: a small diff gets a fast model, a full-section rewrite gets a slower one, and the flat 0.5 credits doesn't move either way. You never pick a model. You press the button.
Where to go deeper
If the five-minute version landed, the docs go further:
- HTML Studio, end to end — templates, the editor, publishing, and version history in one guide.
- The Text family at a glance — how HTML Studio, AI Chat, and Automations relate.
- Automations — scheduled content runs for when pages need to happen without you.
- AI characters & chat — custom agents when you want more than a one-off page.
I came in needing one link that wouldn't embarrass me in a group chat. I stayed because the address survives the page going offline and coming back. Your workshop probably isn't ceramics. But if you've ever cursed a "sign in to view" wall, five minutes is a cheap way to never see one again.