We added up five years on each platform at the Australian prices their own pages showed on 16 October 2026. The cheapest paid plans come in under our $1,500 business website: $1,260 on Wix, and $1,020 plus GST on Squarespace. A site we build also needs hosting and a domain, paid separately. It’s a different story on Wix’s dearer plans. Core, the cheapest one that takes payments, comes to $2,520.
Five years at today’s prices
These are each company’s own prices, read from Perth on 16 October 2026, in Australian dollars. Wix’s page first loaded US prices marked as for reference only, then switched to Australian ones. The totals assume yearly billing, and that the prices don’t change for five years.
| Plan | Five years |
|---|---|
| Wix Light, $21 a month incl. GST | $1,260 |
| Wix Core, $42 a month incl. GST | $2,520 |
| Wix Business, $55 a month incl. GST | $3,300 |
| Squarespace Basic, $17 a month plus GST | $1,020 plus GST |
| Squarespace Core, $28 a month plus GST | $1,680 plus GST |
Every plan includes hosting. Both companies give you the domain free for the first year on these yearly plans. After that the domain renews at a cost that isn’t in these totals. Squarespace adds GST at checkout, and its help centre says the prices on its pricing page don’t include tax.
Light is the cheapest Wix plan that drops the Wix branding and connects your own domain, but it can’t take payments. Squarespace’s Basic plan can, with a 2% fee on online store sales. Wix also has a free plan, with Wix branding and a Wix web address.
When we looked, Squarespace was offering half off the first payment with a code that expires on 18 October 2026. It only applies once, so we left it out.
What a custom site costs over the same five years
Our business website is $1,500, paid once, for up to six pages. Hosting and the domain are separate bills, paid to those companies. Most of a small custom site is plain files, and Cloudflare, which runs this site, has a free plan for hosting them.
Changes are the other running cost. On Wix or Squarespace you make them yourself, whenever you like. On a custom site they go through a developer unless a content manager is built in, and on ours that’s a $500 add-on. Our care plans start at $99 a month and include one small update each month. Over five years that’s $5,940, which is more than any Wix plan in the table.
Paying monthly for a custom site
If you’d rather pay monthly, the way you would for a builder, we do that too. A business website is $99 a month, with hosting and a content update each month included, and it’s yours after about 31 months. That comes to roughly twice the pay-once price. There’s a six-month minimum.
Until the site is yours, it works a lot like a builder. Our terms say that if you cancel before ownership passes to you, the site and its hosting end.
What happens when you stop paying
- Wix
- The site stays up, on a free wixsite.com address with Wix ads on it. Wix says your content isn’t deleted.
- Squarespace
- Visitors get a “Website expired” message and search engines stop indexing the site. Your domain stays registered, and you can move it.
- A custom site you’ve paid for
- There’s no platform fee to stop. You pay a host, and if you leave that host the files go with you.
Taking your site somewhere else
A Wix site can’t leave Wix. Its help centre says the site “needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers”. The same page says the content you build there belongs to you, and that you can buy and manage your domain with another provider.
Squarespace lets you export some of your content as a file made for WordPress. Its own list of what doesn’t export includes store pages, portfolio pages, style settings and custom CSS.
Under our terms, the work we make for you becomes yours once it’s paid in full, so another developer can pick it up from there.
When a builder is the right call
Choose a builder when the site is small and you’d like to make changes yourself. It’s also the sensible way to test an idea before you spend real money on it. Over five years the cheapest plans cost less than our business website, and they include hosting.
If that’s where you’ve landed, do it properly. Our DIY checklist covers the eight things we’d sort out first.
When custom is worth paying for
Go custom when owning the site matters to you, because you can’t take a Wix site with you and only some of a Squarespace site exports. It also makes sense if you’d be on a dearer plan anyway. Five years of Wix Business comes to $3,300, more than twice our business website before its hosting and domain.
Custom is also the way to get a design made for your business. On a builder you start from a template or an AI-generated draft and adjust it from there. Wix lists more than 2,000 templates.
What we couldn’t establish
We didn’t find a fair, measured comparison of how quickly builder sites load or how well they rank against custom ones, so this article doesn’t claim either. If speed matters to you, test it. Put any site you like through Google’s PageSpeed Insights, ours included.
We haven’t priced the apps people add to builder sites, or what hosting and a domain will cost for your particular site. Both platforms can change their prices, which is why every price here carries the date we read it.
Sources
Every figure in this article was read at the document itself.
Common questions
- Is Wix or Squarespace cheaper?
- At the prices we read on 16 October 2026, Squarespace Basic was $17 a month billed yearly, plus GST, and Wix Light was $21 with GST included. Light can’t take payments and Basic can, with a 2% fee on online store sales. Wix also has a free plan, and Squarespace doesn’t.
- Can a Wix site rank on Google?
- Yes, builder sites can rank. We haven’t found a fair measurement of how they rank against custom sites, so we won’t tell you custom ranks better. Google does say it uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking, so check yours on a phone whichever way you build.
- Can you move my Wix or Squarespace site to a custom one?
- We’d rebuild it, because a Wix site only runs on Wix and Squarespace only exports part of a site. We keep your content and your domain, and set up permanent redirects from your old page addresses to the new ones.
- Can I pay for a custom site monthly?
- Yes. A business website is $99 a month with hosting and a monthly content update included, and it’s yours after about 31 months. That’s roughly twice the pay-once price, with a six-month minimum.
- What if $1,500 is too much right now?
- Our brochure site is $800 for two to five pages, if you can supply the words and photos. A single landing page is $500. Both can be paid monthly as well, from $49 a month.