If he’s smart he will use one of those services too.
2 of my friends are into building sites too, I have build most of my site with their help.
They told me they would not do that again trying to reinvent the wheel, but probably use one of these services. Because it is cheaper, quicker and all the tools are already there.
If you would want such a site in Wordpress, it will cost you time, and you will need to buy or subscribe to different modules to get the same functionalities, and then a lot of time to get them working properly.
$29 a month is not that much, a website builder building a new site would spend at least 40 hours of work on it.