Wix, Squarespace, or custom? The 5-year math

Web platform ads lead with the monthly price: $16, $23, $29. Sounds like a coffee habit.

The five-year total never shows up in the ad. For most small businesses, a website lives about five years before it needs an overhaul. I ran the math on the plans a small business actually buys — not the $0 tier that puts platform branding on your site. Here's what came back.

The Wix math

Wix's Business Pro plan costs $27 a month, billed annually. Over five years:

Hosting and platform: $27 × 60 = $1,620
Paid template: $60 to $200
Premium apps (booking, email forms, chat): about $360 over five years for two apps
Migration fee when you leave: at least $400 in developer time, since Wix wraps your content in proprietary templates and doesn't export cleanly

Five-year total: about $2,500.

You buy a website Wix owns. Stop paying and it disappears. Wix raised prices twice in the last three years. You pay whatever they pick.

The Squarespace math

Squarespace Commerce Basic runs $40 a month annually. Their Advanced Commerce plan jumps to $72. I'll use Commerce Basic.

Hosting and platform: $40 × 60 = $2,400
Transaction fees on the Basic plan: 3% of online sales. A shop doing $20K a year pays $600 a year, or $3,000 over five years
Third-party integrations (email marketing, SEO, inventory): $200 to $400 a year
Redesign in year three or four when the template looks dated: $800 to $1,500

Five-year total: $3,000 to $8,000, depending on whether you sell online.

Squarespace templates look good on day one. After that, your site blends in with every other Squarespace site — and the platform caps how fast you can rank.

The custom math

A single-page custom site from a small agency costs $799 to $1,499 one time. I'll use the Standard build at $1,499.

Build: $1,499 one-time
Hosting on Netlify or Cloudflare Pages for a small business: $0 a month. $0 over five years
Domain: $12 to $15 a year × 5 = $75
SSL certificate: free through Let's Encrypt, auto-renewed
Occasional updates: $75 an hour. Most edits take under an hour. Six hours a year × 5 = $2,250. You can skip any of it — no subscription forces the bill.

Five-year total: $3,824 with updates. $1,574 without.

After five years you still own everything. Nothing switches off.

What the platform ads leave out

SEO restarts when you migrate. Google re-crawls and re-ranks every time you switch platforms. Traffic drops 20 to 40 percent for three to six months. That's real revenue, gone.

Lock-in is real. Your content sits inside a proprietary database. You can't export it cleanly. When you leave, you rebuild or pay someone to rebuild.

Platform outages are real. Wix went dark for 14 hours in 2023. Squarespace went dark in 2024. When it hits a Friday dinner rush, you disappear at the worst possible moment.

Platforms get sold. New owners raise prices or change terms. This has happened many times in the last decade. You're the captive audience.

Their "SEO tools" are checklists. Page speed, clean HTML, proper schema markup live inside the platform's template code. A custom site ranks better because nothing hides under the hood.

Who each one fits

Wix or Squarespace fits if:

You need the site up by Sunday
Your budget caps under $500 total
You're testing whether the business idea works at all
You enjoy drag-and-drop editors

A custom build fits if:

Your business is real and you plan to run it for two or more years
You care about search rankings and load speed
You want to own what you pay for
You hate monthly bills on principle

A food truck in year one that may not survive winter should probably start on Wix. A food truck in year three with steady regulars and a growing menu should move to something they own.

The close

Page builders run on subscriptions. I run on projects. Two business models — two different kinds of websites.

If your business cleared the "will this work?" phase, the math tilts every year you stay on a platform. Five years in, you paid for a custom site two or three times over, and you still own nothing.

That number never shows up in the ad.