The Complete Guide To Squarespace Pricing (2023)

As DIY website builders go, Squarespace has long been seen as the Neiman Marcus of the industry; a pricier, more elegant alternative to the likes of Wix and Weebly.

This notion has always been something of an exaggeration, as Squarespace’s pricing and level of features don’t drastically differ from the offerings of the competition. However, considering the fact that Squarespace, unlike the aforementioned builders, doesn’t offer a free subscription plan, we thought it would be helpful to take a closer look at Squarespace pricing to assess the value proposition of the company’s paid plans and their suitability for different business purposes.

We discussed Squarespace’s pricing policies in our Squarespace review, but we thought the subject deserved a deeper examination.

How Much Does Squarespace Cost?

Squarespace offers four subscription plans ranging from $16-$46/month. Looking at Squarespace pricing, you’ll notice that while Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, you can use Squarespace cost-free for a 14-day trial period. After this period ends, is when need to choose a subscription plan.

Squarespace Pricing Plans

Squarespace’s four subscription plans are offered on both a monthly and an annual basis. We recommend going with an annual plan. Why? For starters, under the current Squarespace pricing system, you’ll end up paying up to 25% more for a month-by-month subscription. What’s more, with an annual plan, you can get a custom domain from Squarespace for no additional cost for one year. A custom domain purchased through Squarespace costs around $20 to $70 per year, and monthly plans don’t give you a free year of domain registration. If you’re planning on getting your own custom domain from Squarespace, the annual plans become that much more of a better deal.

Considering the fact that you can freely test Squarespace’s features for 14 days before committing to a subscription, I see no reason to opt for a month-to-month plan over an annual plan.

As for the four subscription plans, they follow the pricing model of other SaaS subscription services in that the higher/pricier the subscription tier, the more value you’ll get in terms of features and benefits.

Squarespace Personal

Squarespace’s Personal plan is the company’s least expensive plan. Accordingly, it is also lighter on features than the other plans.

The Personal plan costs $12/month with an annual subscription ($144 per year) and $16/month with a month-to-month subscription. Here’s what you’ll get with a Personal plan:

• Unlimited bandwidth and storage
• Mobile-optimized website
• Basic website metrics
• Up to two contributors
• SSL security included
• Free custom domain for one year (with annual purchase)
• Squarespace extensions

Squarespace Business

Squarespace’s Business plan is a step-up from the Personal plan. The Business plan costs $18/month with an annual subscription ($216 per year) and $26/month with a month-to-month subscription.

A Squarespace Business subscription will get you everything from the Personal plan plus the following:

• Unlimited contributors
• Fully integrated eCommerce
• Sell unlimited products and accept donations
• 3% transaction fee
• Professional email from Google
• $100 Google Ads credit
• Promotional pop-ups
• Mobile information bar
• Complete customization through CSS and JavaScript
• Premium blocks and integrations
• Announcement bar

Squarespace Basic Commerce

The cheaper of Squarespace’s two eCommerce plans, the Basic Commerce plan costs $26/month with an annual subscription ($312/year) and $30/month with a month-to-month subscription.

Along with everything included in the first two plans, this is what you’ll get with the Basic Commerce plan (the lack of a platform transaction fee is important):

• No transaction fee
• Point of sale
• Mobile-optimized website and checkout
• Powerful commerce analytics
• Inventory, orders, tax, discounts
• Limited availability labels
• Checkout on your domain
• Customer accounts
• Products on Instagram

Squarespace Advanced Commerce

Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce plan is its most well-featured — and expensive — subscription plan.

The Advanced Commerce plan costs $40/month with an annual subscription ($480/year) and $46/month with a monthly subscription. Along with the features of the first three plans, here’s what you’ll get with an Advanced Commerce plan:

• Subscriptions
• Abandoned cart auto-recovery
• Advanced shipping
• Advanced discounts
• Gift cards
• Commerce APIs

Squarespace Plans Compared

Here’s a handy comparison table that shows you the salient aspects of each Squarespace pricing plan.

Get Started With Squarespace

Additional Squarespace Fees

In addition to the cost of a subscription, other fees come into play when you use certain features offered by Squarespace.

Squarespace Email

Note that Squarespace offers email accounts through their G Suite integration starting at the Business subscription level. So long as you have at least one custom domain for a website, you can get a custom email address, fully accessible from your Squarespace account. Squarespace pricing for email accounts is as follows:

• Annual plan –$72/year ($6/month) per user/email address
• Monthly plan – $6/month per user/email address

Email billing is done directly through Squarespace.

Squarespace Domains

I mentioned earlier that Squarespace sells domains and that your domain will be free for a year with an annual subscription. After your first year, however, your Squarespace domain will cost between $20-$70/year, with pricing depending on the domain’s TLD. That’s fairly pricey as domains go – many registrars offer domains for around $10-$15/year. If you purchase a domain elsewhere, you can transfer it to Squarespace or connect it by changing your DNS settings. Of course, you may not get a free year’s worth of domain use this way.

Squarespace eCommerce

A key difference between Squarespace’s plans — key for online sellers, anyway — is the transaction fee Squarespace takes out of online store purchases. With a Business subscription, Squarespace takes 3% of each purchase as a fee. However, with either a Basic or Advanced Commerce plan, this fee is waived.

Of course, regardless of your subscription level, you’ll still have payment processing fees taken out of your sales by the payment processor. These will vary depending on what country you’re doing business from, but in the US, both Stripe andPayPal(the two payment processors available with a Squarespce online store) charge 2.9% plus $0.30 per successful online transaction.

Squarespace Point Of Sale

Squarespace recently partnered with Square to introduce its new Point Of Sale system, allowing merchants to process in-person sales using Squarespace’s Commerce app and a Square card reader. To incorporate Squarespace Point Of Sale into your website, you’ll need a Basic or Advanced Commerce subscription. Square’s payment processing fees are thus:

• 2.6% + $0.10 for swiped/dipped/tapped transactions
• 3.5% + $0.15 for keyed transactions

You’ll also need to create a Square account, which is free, and purchase a Square card reader. A Square Reader for contactless and chip goes for $49 and will accept chip cards and contactless NFC payments.

Note that when you sell through Squarespace, you can’t use Square as your in-person payment processor, just as you can’t use Stripe or PayPal to process in-person transactions.

Next, let’s take a look at what else you’re getting for your money with Squarespace.

Squarespace Integrations & Add-Ons

Get Started With Squarespace

Squarespace has never been as integration-heavy as Wix or Weebly, each of which have their own extensive app stores. However, over the years, Squarespace has gradually extended its functionality with strategic integrations. Most are included for free, while a few require their own subscriptions, such as ShipStation (pricing starts at $9/month) and MailChimp (basic accounts are free but advanced subscriptions start at $9.99/month).

Here’s a sampling of the other Squarespace integrations you’ll find:

Commerce

• Apple Pay
• PayPal
• Stripe
• Square
• Multiple shipping carriers

Design

• Adobe Fonts
• Google Fonts

Domains & Email

• GoDaddy
• G Suite
• Namecheap

Squarespace also integrates with Zapier. Zapier is a service that lets you connect with over 1,000 additional apps, thus expanding your functionality options. Lastly, Squarespace has APIs available for users on the Business and Commerce plans. You (or your web developer) can use these APIs to build integrations with other third-party software.

How To Save On Squarespace

Let’s discuss how you can avoid paying an unnecessary amount with Squarespace.

Monthly VS Yearly Pricing

Returning to this topic, remember that with Squarespace pricing, an annual plan is always a better deal than monthly pricing, unless you only need a website for a very short period of time. That’s because annual plans are discounted 13%-25% relative to month-to-month plans. You can also get a free domain for a year with an annual plan. Not so with a monthly plan.

Choosing the Right Plan

The biggest factor in saving money with Squarespace is simply making sure your subscription level fits your business so you’re not paying for features you don’t need and aren’t going to use. Of course, it won’t do you any good to get a subscription that doesn’t deliver the features you need for your business, either.

Look closely at which features are included with which plans, and make sure that the plan you ultimately choose includes all the features you need. Just don’t go overboard and get a plan that includes features that aren’t relevant to your website goals.

Squarespace Student Pricing

If you’re a student, you can get a special deal on Squarespace pricing. Sign up for an account with your academic email address, and you can get 50% off your first full year.

Which Version Of Squarespace Is Right For Me?

How do you choose which Squarespace plan is right for your business? Here’s a breakdown of what industries and business sizes each Squarespace pricing plan is best for.

Choose the Squarespace Personal plan if…

A Personal plan is great if you are a photographer, artist, musician, or designer looking for a great-looking site without eCommerce functionality. A $12/month Personal subscription, though pricier than the “cheap” option of some of Squarespace’s rivals, can be seen as quite a bargain — especially given the professionalism of the templates. Commissioning an equivalent-looking custom site from a web designer might take you into 4-digit pricing territory — if you’re lucky.

Choose the Squarespace Business plan if…

Photographers/artists/designers wanting to build a site, but who need greater functionality that the Personal plan offers, would do well to go with a Business subscription. If you want to market yourself or your business with professional email addresses, customize your site with CSS and/or JavaScript, or take advantage of advanced website analytics, a Business plan is a must. And while a Business plan offers eCommerce functionality, I wouldn’t recommend a Business plan for online stores due to the 3% transaction fee applied to all transactions.

Choose the Squarespace Basic Commerce plan if…

If you’re an online merchant looking to build a basic online store, the Basic Commerce plan should serve you well. The biggest benefit is the waiving of the Squarespace platform fees, with customer accounts, Point Of Sale for offline sales, and a secure checkout page on your domain adding all the more value to the equation.

Choose the Squarespace Advanced Commerce plan if…

Those seeking to build an online store with advanced functionality should, naturally, gravitate towards the $40/month Advanced Commerce plan. With abandoned cart recovery, real-time shipping estimates, commerce APIs, and more, you’ll get plenty of value for your money.

How Squarespace’s Prices Compare To Wix, Weebly, & Others

Perhaps the biggest difference between Squarespace and its immediate competitors is the fact that Squarespace offers no free plan. Beyond that, when comparing Squarespace prices with other popular website builders, there isn’t a dramatic difference. While it was once the case that Squarespace’s prices were relatively high, the company’s main rivals seem to have caught up to them.

Wix

Case in point: Wix. In the past, Wix had offered cheap plans at about half the price of Squarespace’s cheapest plan. However, Wix has revamped their offerings, and now the cheapest Wix plan goes for $13/month — just $1/month more than Squarespace’s Personal plan. With similar pricing and a similar level of features provided, those looking for a basic website package between the two will probably base their decision on grounds other than cost.

Wix’s pricing and the number of plans offered are constantly in flux, but at the moment, Wix offers seven main subscription plans ranging from $13/month to $49/month (there’s also a special option for enterprise-level business and corporations for $500/month that has no real Squarespace equivalent). Wix’s cheapest eCommerce-enabled plan goes for $23/month, slightly less than Squarespace’s Basic Commerce plan ($26/month), its closest equivalent (I don’t consider Squarespace’s Business plan to be equivalent due to its unfortunate 3% transaction fee). Again, the differences are minor.

Check out our Wix VS Squarespace article for a more thorough comparison.

Weebly

Comparing Squarespace’s pricing with that of Weebly is particularly hard considering the fact that Weebly presents some users with different pricing plans than others, so the prices listed on Weebly’s website may not be the same prices you’re offered when you actually go to purchase a plan. Regardless, Weebly does currently have a plan (the Personal plan) listed for the low price of $6/month. Sounds like a better deal than Squarespace’s cheapest plan, right?

Well, not so fast. This putative $6 Weebly plan doesn’t include the ability to buy a Weebly domain — you can only connect your existing domain. The plan also forces you to carry Weebly ads. The only way your website should have to carry company advertising is if you’re getting it for free. Therefore, I can’t say this plan gives you better value than Squarespace’s “cheap” plan, despite the cost difference.

Weebly’s other two paid plans are listed as selling for $12/month and $26/month, respectively. Weebly’s $26/month plan is a particularly good value — even if the price you’re offered for the plan is slightly different, it still offers up a very solid eCommerce package (Square bought Weebly in 2018), complete with such features as abandoned cart emails, discounted shipping, and the ability to accept both Square and PayPal payments. It stacks up pretty well with Squarespace’s $40 Advanced Commerce plan, to be honest.

Shopify

Shopify is singularly devoted to commerce, so it has a somewhat different (though overlapping) target audience than Squarespace. However, some comparisons can still be made. Here’s one big similarity: Shopify does not offer a free plan.

Shopify’s cheapest plan, at $29/month, gives you quite a formidable eCommerce package that stacks up well with Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce plan ($40/month) — with the key difference that Shopify’s plan only allows for two staff accounts while Squarespace’s plan allows unlimited contributors. Nonetheless, Shopify gives you great eCommerce right out of the gate. Shopify’s other two plans — $79/month and $299/month respectively — offer even greater commerce value, though their price points put them out of direct competition with Squarespace’s plans.

All things considered, while Squarespace is good for creating smaller online stores (and stylish ones at that), Shopify provides the superior package for most sellers, and at an extremely competitive price point to boot. Check out our Shopify VS Squarespace article for more info.

The Bottom Line On Squarespace Pricing

Squarespace may not offer a bare-bones free subscription package like many of its rivals, but that’s not really in-keeping with the company’s brand. Squarespace likes to project an image of elegance and hip sophistication, counting on people’s willingness to pay for the particular value provided. Considering the fact that you can put together something that looks crisp and behaves well without the services of a web designer at a fraction of the cost, Squarespace puts together a compelling case for those who want to go the DIY route without the risk of looking amateurish.

Just be sure you’ve purchased a subscription plan that does everything you’ll need it to do.

Get Started With Squarespace