Wix or Squarespace vs a bespoke site: what you actually get for the money

We have already written about what actually matters when you compare Wix or Squarespace with a hand-built site: speed, plugins, hitting a wall on anything custom. This piece is narrower. It is about money, and about who owns what at the end of it.

Because the honest objection to a bespoke site is not “templates are fine”. It is “my site costs me a tenner a month, why would I pay more?” That is a fair question and it deserves a proper answer rather than a sales line.

What the subscription actually buys

At the time of writing, Wix’s cheapest paid plan is £108 a year, Wix Core is £192 and Squarespace Core is £204, all on their advertised annual-billed rates checked in September 2026. Monthly billing costs more. Both include a domain free for the first year on an annual plan.

For that you get a place to put a site, a template, an editor, and hosting. That is genuinely useful, and for some businesses it is all they will ever need.

What it does not include is the website. You still have to build it. Published estimates put that at 20–40 hours for the build alone, and 60–80 once you count learning the platform, writing the copy and doing the search basics. Nothing in the subscription covers any of that.

The rest of the bill

Four things sit outside the headline number, and they are the ones people rarely add up.

• Your hours. If you charge £40 an hour and spend twenty hours building the site, that is £800 of work you didn’t do. The cheap plan just became the expensive one. At £25 an hour it is £500; at £60 it is £1,200.
• Plugins. Bookings, a review widget, a decent form, a popup that doesn’t look dated: each one is an app with its own monthly charge. None looks like much. Together they routinely outgrow the plan itself.
• Transaction fees. If you sell anything, there is usually a percentage on every sale, on top of what the payment processor already takes. Invisible on one order, obvious on a thousand.
• Upkeep. Roughly an hour a month keeping a builder site current is twelve hours a year. Nothing is watching for the form that stopped sending or the link that now 404s. You find out when the enquiries stop.

What a bespoke site buys

“Bespoke” is not a fancier word for expensive. It means the site is built for your business specifically, in plain code, with nothing running in the background you didn’t ask for.

In money terms it buys four things the subscription cannot.

• The site itself. Files on your domain, in your hands. Stop paying a builder and the site goes with it. Stop paying us and you take the files with you.
• Somebody else’s hours. Our build takes about an hour of your time, answering questions. The rest is ours.
• The search basics, built in. Page titles, descriptions, headings, a sitemap, structured business details. On a builder, these are things you have to know to do. Here they are part of the job.
• Someone watching it. If something breaks while your hosting is with us, it is on us. Small fixes and structural issues sorted, for as long as the hosting is with us.

The three-year maths, done honestly

Take the cheapest Wix plan at £108 a year. Over three years that is £324, plus your hours, plus whatever plugins you end up needing.

Our standard rebuild is £175 with the first year’s hosting included, then £99 a year from year two. Three years: £373. About £49 more in cash than the cheapest Wix plan over the same period, for a site you didn’t have to build, that you own, that somebody is watching.

That is the whole argument, and it is deliberately unexciting. The cash is close. The difference is twenty-plus hours of your evenings up front and an hour a month after, the plugin bills that never arrive, and a set of files with your name on them. Against Wix Core or Squarespace Core, ours is cheaper in cash as well as in hours. Against the free tier with their branding on your footer, they win on cash and lose on everything else.

Ownership is the bit that matters later

Nobody thinks about ownership on the day they sign up. It matters on three later days.

The day you want to move. A builder site cannot be exported in any useful form. You are rebuilding from scratch, not migrating, and a decade of small edits goes with it.

The day the platform changes the deal. Prices go up, a feature moves to a higher tier, the free tier gets a new restriction. You can accept it or leave, and leaving means starting again.

The day you hire someone. A developer can take a folder of HTML and build on it. Handed a Wix login, the best they can do is patch around the template’s limits, at an hourly rate, on top of the subscription you are still paying.

A bespoke site on your own domain, with the files in your possession, has none of those days. The domain is the asset. The files are yours. Everything else is replaceable, including us.

Where a builder is still the right answer

To be clear about it: if you are testing whether an idea has legs, with no clients and no track record, use a builder. If your budget is genuinely zero, use a builder. If your business is one page, one location and the same six services for years, a builder site can sit there indefinitely and be fine.

The mistake is not starting on one. It is staying on one after the business has outgrown it, paying for the plan, the plugins and the hours, and not noticing because no single bill ever looks big.

What it costs with us, exactly

From £175 to rebuild the site you already have. £215 built from nothing. A year’s hosting and SSL in the price, then Care at £99 a year, Found at £39 a month if you want the search work done for you, Growing at £79 a month for a new page every month. Live in under a week, depending on the build. You don’t pay the balance until you love it.

And if you want to see the hand-built version of your own site before deciding, we build a few of your pages free and send them over as a link. No call, no card, and the sums above are the sums.