Squarespace, Wix, or a custom site?

The question is usually asked as "which is cheaper," and that is the one question where the answer tells you least.

What you are actually choosing between is renting a template and owning a system built around how your business works. One of those is priced by the month, climbs a ladder of plans, and on most of them takes a cut of what you sell. The other is priced once.

A brochure is five tidy pages and a phone number, and a template does that well. Machinery is a booking the owner approves before the slot locks, a deposit taken in the same moment, a quote that follows your rules rather than the software's. Whether your site is a brochure or machinery decides this, and it decides it before price ever comes into it.

So start there, not with the pricing pages.

Platforms are excellent at the common case and rigid at the uncommon one. The trouble is that the uncommon part is usually the part that is your business.

Here is the clearest example I have built, for a grooming shop whose calendar is the whole business.

A customer asks for a time. The owner approves it — or offers a different one. Only then does the slot lock, and the deposit is taken before the appointment. That second step is not a setting in any booking plugin. It exists because a groomer who loses a Saturday to a no-show does not get that Saturday back.

Ask yourself what your version of that is. How you quote. How you schedule. What happens between the enquiry and the invoice. On a platform, the answer to anything unusual is either a monthly app subscription that does 80% of it, or changing how you work to suit the software. Both are costs. Neither appears on the pricing page.

The other ceiling is the dashboard. A platform gives you a page builder with two hundred controls, most of which can break your layout. A site built for you can give you the four things you actually change, and nothing else — which is why clients on my Business tier update their own prices and photos and never call me.

That is the comparison that decides whether a price was worth paying. My prices for each of those columns are on the hire page, in full, with no call required to see them.

Now the money. Platform pricing is a ladder, and the rung you land on is decided by one feature you need — not by how big your business is.

WordPress.com is the clearest case: $4 a month on Personal, $8 on Premium, $25 on Business. Plugins used to start at that top rung; they now run on every paid plan, and what the $25 buys instead is SSH and WP-CLI — the access you need to deploy code of your own. The rung moved. The ladder did not. Shopify runs the same shape: $29, $79, $299.

Two things follow. First, the honest way to price a platform is to find the one feature you actually need, look up which rung carries it, and price that rung. Second, every figure above is the annual, prepaid-in-full rate — pay monthly and WordPress.com Personal is $9 rather than $4, and Shopify Basic is $39 rather than $29. The number in the advertising is the best case of the cheapest plan.

My own row is on that chart for comparison: $6 to $16 a month, which is the whole bill — the domain, in your name, plus metered hosting at cost, with no feature behind a rung. It is a range because hosting is billed by use: a five-page site sits near the bottom, one carrying a dashboard, a database and payments near the top. The build that produces it is paid once.

This is the part that goes missing from every comparison of these prices, including the one above: a platform plan buys you the software. It does not buy you anybody to build the site. You do that — evenings, your own photographs, your own words, your own patience with a page builder — or you pay somebody who does it for a living.

Every one of these companies knows it, which is why every one of them runs a marketplace for exactly that, priced separately from the plan:

• WordPress.com publishes its own numbers: $499 one-time for a built five-page site, plus $120 a year for the Premium plan it requires, or $360 a year if it needs a store. Custom work starts at $5,000.
• Squarespace does not publish a price. Its marketplace says the cost "will vary based on the scope of your project," and each expert lists their own estimate on their profile.
• Wix does not set prices either. Professionals on its marketplace post their own "starting at" figures, which ran from $100 to $1,800 on the day I looked. No unit is printed beside them: Wix tells its partners to "set starting rates for each service", and tells buyers to agree the price with the professional before hiring. So the range is a floor on one piece of work — not an hourly rate, and not a quote anyone has stood behind.

So the honest version of the cheapest row on that chart is: $4 a month, and then either your evenings or somebody's invoice. Some people enjoy the building, and if you are one of them, go and enjoy it. Most of the owners I talk to did not want a second job — they wanted the thing finished, and what they found was that the page builder was the easy part and writing the words, choosing the photographs and deciding what the site should actually say is what took the three months.

Either way it belongs in the comparison, because the moment you pay somebody to do it, you are paying for a build and renting the software it sits on, every year, for as long as the site exists.

What you get from me is one price that includes the building, and a monthly bill that is the domain and the hosting at cost.

If nothing on your site takes money, skip this section — it will not change your answer, and I would rather you skipped it than counted a cost you will never pay.

If you do sell, this is the part that actually moves money, and it is the part that gets left out of the comparison.

Squarespace charges a 2% fee on store sales on its entry plan — and 7% on digital content and memberships — falling to 0% only as you climb. Shopify charges 2.0% on Basic if you use any payment provider other than its own, 1.0% on Grow, 0.6% on Advanced. That fee is not for processing the card; the card is charged separately. It is a fee for selling through their software.

Wix is the exception worth stating plainly: its published fee schedule is 2.9% + 30¢ in the US with no cut on top. On this one line it matches a site I build, which pays the same 2.9% + 30¢ to Stripe and nothing to anybody else, because there is no platform in the middle. Everything else on this page still applies to Wix — the plan ladder, the subscription that never stops, and the fact that somebody still has to build it.

A percentage grows with you. A price does not.

Put numbers on it. A shop taking $5,000 a month pays Squarespace's entry plan about $1,428 a year — the plan itself, plus 2% of everything it sells. Over five years that is $7,140. A Business tier build is $3,250 once plus about $10 a month to run: $3,850 over the same five years. The two cross somewhere in year three, and after that the gap only widens.

The build costs the same in the year you double as in the year you launched. Run the multiplication on your own takings before you compare anything else.

None of that makes a platform the wrong answer. For a good number of businesses it is plainly the right one, and I would rather say so here than have you find it out after you have paid me.

If what you need is five pages that look tidy, say what you do, and put your phone number in front of somebody — no bookings, no deposits, no store, no member area, nothing unusual about how you work — then a template will do that for about $228 a year, and it will do it well. Spend the difference on photography, which will move your phone more than either of us will.

Here is that arithmetic, and I am not going to hide it behind a chart. Five years of template comes to about $1,140. A Starter build is $1,500 once plus about $6 a month to keep it running — roughly $1,860 over the same five years. So the template is the cheaper of the two, by about $700 over five years, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling something. Paying somebody else to build it does not reliably change that either: WordPress.com's own $499 service plus the $120 a year plan it requires comes to about $1,099 over five years, cheaper again. It is only at the top of a marketplace designer's range — the $1,800 starting figure above — that a template passes a Starter at all.

Which means cost is not the argument, and I am not going to pretend it is. If five tidy pages is genuinely all you need, the template wins on price and it will serve you well. The argument is everything on the chart above: no rung to climb when you need one more feature, no cut of a sale, and a site built around how you work instead of chosen from a grid. Those are worth $700 to some businesses and to others they are worth nothing, and the only way to know which you are is to price the thing you actually need.

Either way, price is not what decides this one. What decides it is the first section of this article.

On Squarespace, Wix or Shopify you own your content and your data. You do not own the software, you cannot take it elsewhere, and the site goes off when you stop paying.

With me: your domain, content, photos and customer data are yours outright and in your name from day one; the accounts the site depends on are yours with me added; and the code is licensed to you while it runs on infrastructure I manage. The full version of that, including what happens if you leave, is in what you own when you hire a web developer.

The practical difference is not the copyright line. It is that a platform's answer to "can it do this?" is fixed, and mine is a conversation.

A platform is the right answer if your site is a brochure, nothing about how you work is unusual, and you would rather pay monthly than once. Buy a good template and get back to work.

A custom build is the right answer if the site is doing a job — taking bookings with rules, taking deposits, quoting, running a member area, publishing at volume — or you are selling enough that a percentage has started to matter, or you have already hit a platform's ceiling once and would rather not do it again.

And one thing that is true whichever you choose: 83% of US small businesses now have a website, and 81% have already redesigned one at least once (Clutch, a survey of 406 US small business owners, August 2025). You will rebuild this eventually. That is the argument for owning your domain and your content on day one, wherever you start — it costs nothing to get right now and is expensive to fix later. Here is how to do that.

If you want to know which of these you are, the free 20-minute call ends with me telling you — including when the answer is a template.