Wow! We’ve been building B12 for a little more than 10 years now. Today, we announced B12 3.0. As the name suggests, 3.0 represents the third major generation of our approach to helping our customers build their web presence:

  • B12 1.0 (2015 - 2020) was all about having experts do it for you. When we first started B12, we built Orchestra to help assemble teams of designers, copywriters, and project managers in minutes. Using previous generations of AI models, we supercharged a traditional design agency model and provided experts with powertools to make their work more effective.
  • B12 2.0 (2020-2025) introduced AI-scaffolded starting points. As large language and image generation models got increasingly powerful, we moved to a world where you could describe what you wanted to a model. The model would pick a respectable starting point for a website and then fill it in with the copy and imagery that made sense for your business. As customers became more comfortable with AI tooling, we saw a big change in their preferences: In January 2023, 90% of B12’s customers requested expert help after an AI generated their website. By January 2024, 90% of our customers looked at their AI-generated website and decided they could launch on their own.
  • B12 3.0 (2026 and beyond) offers fully customized AI-generated websites. The “AI fills in the blanks” of B12 2.0 was too rigid in the structure, style, and functionality of websites we could offer customers. With 3.0, a coding agent can fully customize every detail of a customer’s project. With B12 3.0, we’ve seen people build online stores, web apps, business tools, blogs, portfolios, and landing pages. Our customers’ freedom to create what they envision is so gratifying.

B12 3.0 was a big gamble. We prototyped it during a hackathon at the end of October 2025, and by February 2026 we were A/B testing it with customers. Could a product we built in 3 months really outperform an experience we spent a decade refining? Would customers put up with the added latency of a coding agent? What bugs or infrastructure quirks lurked?

Our A/B test results put our anxiety to rest: when we randomized reveals for the faster and more established 2.0 against the more flexible and higher-quality upstart 3.0, the purchase rate of B12 3.0 was nearly 2x that of B12 2.0. Despite many opportunities for improvement, customers already see B12 3.0 as our best experience yet.

When we make launch announcements, I typically list the people involved as a sign of my appreciation. I’m breaking with tradition because this release is so big that every B12er made it possible. Our product, customer success, and marketing teams were consumed with it for the past few months. Yes, 3.0 is a momentous thing, but its release was also a momentous process that involved so many people I’m grateful for.