Do you have to pay for a website monthly? On Wix or Squarespace, yes, if you want your own domain, no builder ads and, on Squarespace, a site that stays public: the plan is a subscription, and the site lives on the builder’s platform. A website with no monthly fees is possible, but only if you buy the site rather than rent the plan, with a one time payment for the website and your own accounts underneath it.
Neither route is wrong. On price, the builder usually wins over five years. What is left at the end is where they differ. This post works through both, using Wix and Squarespace’s own pricing pages and totals computed rather than rounded in anyone’s favour.
What a website builder costs per month
A builder plan bundles the tool, the hosting and the support into one monthly charge. It is a fair way to buy, and for many sites it is the cheapest way to start. The figures below are each company’s own, for the plan paid yearly, shown as a monthly equivalent: Wix at £9, £16 and £25 for Light, Core and Business, and Squarespace at £12, £17 and £29 for Basic, Core and Plus.
Two notes on reading them. Wix states that its prices do not include applicable taxes, so add VAT to those. Squarespace’s pricing page does not say how VAT is treated, so we make no claim either way. And a plan billed month by month costs more than the same plan paid yearly: Squarespace Core is £24 a month billed monthly, against £17 billed annually.
Five years, ten years, and what you hold at the end
The table runs the yearly plans for 5 and 10 years against one Onlineify build, paid as a single one time payment.
| Route | Per month | Over 5 years | Over 10 years | What you hold at year 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix Light plan | £9 | £540 | £1,080 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Wix Core plan | £16 | £960 | £1,920 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Wix Business plan | £25 | £1,500 | £3,000 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Wix Business Elite plan | £119 | £7,140 | £14,280 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Squarespace Basic plan | £12 | £720 | £1,440 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Squarespace Core plan | £17 | £1,020 | £2,040 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Squarespace Plus plan | £29 | £1,740 | £3,480 | A plan you keep paying for. The site stays on the platform. |
| Onlineify Lite | None | £1,950 + domain at cost | The same. Nothing more to pay but the domain. | Code, hosting, CMS and domain, all in your accounts. Only the domain renews. |
| Onlineify Business | None | £3,950 + domain at cost | The same. Nothing more to pay but the domain. | As above, with more pages and lead capture. |
Builder plans are the yearly price as a monthly equivalent, so Wix is ex VAT and Squarespace’s VAT is not stated. Onlineify prices are ex VAT. The domain is the same annual registrar charge on either route; on ours it is paid at cost, with no Onlineify mark-up, and the full running-cost list shows it beside the zeroes. Business has no like-for-like builder plan, so read the plan totals against Lite; the extra pages and lead capture are what the higher price adds.
Read that straight. Over 5 years 6 of those 7 plans cost less than a build; the exception is Wix Business Elite plan. A Wix Light plan at £9 a month comes to £540, and if all you need is a simple page up quickly, that is a good reason to choose it. We are not cheaper than the small plans, and we will not pretend to be. Stretch it to 10 years and Wix Light plan, Wix Core plan and Squarespace Basic plan still cost less than a build. The rest have passed it.
The gap closes as the plan climbs. Wix Business takes about 6.5 years to cost what an Onlineify Lite build does, Squarespace Plus about 5.6 years, and Wix Business Elite, at £119 a month, about 1.4 years. One more thing the table leaves out: a builder plan does not include the time, or a freelancer’s fee, to build the site. A build fee does.
What happens to a builder site when you stop paying
At the time of writing, the help pages of both companies describe it differently. On Wix, when a Premium plan ends the site stays live, but the address reverts to a free Wix address, Wix ads appear, and Wix says cancelling does not delete your site content. On Squarespace, a site whose subscription ends shows a “Website expired” message, becomes private and drops out of search, and you can still reach its settings to export.
That export is a file in WordPress format covering the content types Squarespace supports. Per its help page, some page types, video and audio blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS are not included. Either way, a builder site lives on the builder’s platform and depends on the plan for its own domain, ad-free display and, on Squarespace, staying online at all, and moving to another host generally means rebuilding rather than a one-click export. That is the trade, and for many people it is a reasonable one.
A website with no monthly fees: what that takes
It takes the site to sit on accounts that cost nothing to keep, in your name. With an Onlineify build the code is in a repository you own, the hosting is your own Cloudflare account, the editing system is your own Sanity account and the domain is in your own registrar account. Hosting and the editing system run on free tiers, so there is no Onlineify subscription to cancel. That is not an introductory offer: it is how the site is built. Who owns your website goes through those accounts one by one, and the vision page sets out why we build this way.
Website design: one time payment or monthly plan
The two routes do different jobs. A builder plan gives you a tool, and you assemble the site yourself from its templates. A website design bought as a one time payment is a finished site made for you, to a published price. Here is how to choose.
A builder is the right call when:
- You are not sure it will last. If you do not yet know the business will last the year, a low monthly plan is cheap insurance and easy to walk away from.
- You want to make it yourself. If you enjoy building and have the evenings for it, a builder is a real tool, not a compromise.
- The site is small and likely to stay that way. A one-page presence or a simple booking link does not need a build.
- You would rather have one company to ring. A subscription includes support from the platform, which some owners value above the cost.
Paying once makes more sense when:
- The site is staying. A site you will still run in three, five or ten years is where the gap between a monthly plan and a one-off fee narrows, as the table shows.
- You want to be able to leave. If your site is in your accounts and your code is in your repository, no supplier can raise a price on you or switch you off.
- You do not want to build it. The work is done for you, not handed over as a template and a deadline.
- You want the price on the label. Ours are published in full, with no quote to request.
The third route
Most people think the choice is a cheap monthly builder or an expensive custom designer. There is a third route: a finished, custom-designed site, bought once at a published price, that you own from the first day. Onlineify is that route. For the smallest sites a builder usually wins on price, and we would rather say so. For a site you intend to keep, and to own, the argument is not the first five years but what you hold after them. If you are still asking whether you need a site at all, start with do I need a website for my business, and website builder vs web designer sets the three routes side by side.
Our full price list, line by line, is on what a website actually costs.