What A Website Really Costs: Platforms Versus Owning It

Shopify’s ads say $29 a month. So do Squarespace’s. That number is real, but it is the discounted rate for paying a full year up front, and it is the plan below the one most real small businesses actually need. Get on a plan that can run a real store, and all three land close to $39 a month: Shopify Basic, Squarespace Core, and Wix Business. Wix only publishes its true monthly-billed rate once you have created a paid account, so the figure below is its annual rate, labeled as such.

Three Years, Side By Side

Platform figures verified directly against each provider’s own pricing page on August 13, 2026. None of them include per-transaction fees, paid apps, or removing the platform’s branding, covered below.

The table above is the advertised plan price, and it undersells the real number. On the sticker price alone, the platform looks cheaper for years. That is not what a real business actually pays.

What A Real Store Actually Costs

A small store on Shopify’s Basic plan doing $3,000 to $5,000 a month in sales, running the apps a real store needs (SEO, email marketing, reviews), lands between $164 and $204 a month once the transaction fee is added, not $39. That is $1,968 to $2,448 a year, every year, for as long as the store exists. Squarespace and Wix both carry their own version of this: Squarespace takes up to 7% on digital products and memberships, and neither platform’s app ecosystem is free once a store needs real functionality.

Compare that to what it costs to keep an owned site running: $24.99 a month, $300 a year. On the real numbers, not the advertised ones, a $3,500 build is paid back in under two years, and every year after that is the platform’s real monthly cost minus $300.

Here is what the sticker price also leaves out.

You Never Own The Platform Version

Stop paying Shopify, Squarespace, or Wix and your site is gone the same day, no matter how many years you have paid in. Stop paying me and your site keeps running exactly as it did the day before, because the code, the domain, and the database were always yours. That is not a small difference for a business that depends on the site to make money.

The Hard Part Isn’t The Money, It’s The Exit

Shopify’s own Terms of Service: “we may suspend or terminate your Account… for any reason, without notice and at any time.” When that happens, the store goes offline immediately, with no refund. A merchant can export product and customer data as a CSV file, but not a working copy of the site, because Shopify’s theme system does not run anywhere but Shopify’s own servers.

Wix is direct about the same limit in its own help center: “Your Wix site is a standard HTML5 site… it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers… the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting.” There is no export of a whole Wix site, at any price, ever. Squarespace’s export covers pages, posts, text and gallery blocks, not the design itself.

None of this is hidden or unusual for a subscription business. It just means the cheap way in comes with an expensive way out, or no way out at all. A site built here does not have that problem, because the files were never anyone’s but yours.

And The Plan You Are Comparing Today Is Not Fixed

All three platforms have raised prices, restructured tiers, or moved features behind a paywall in the last two years. A subscription can change the deal on you. A site you own cannot.

None of this means a platform is a bad choice. If you are testing an idea, selling a handful of products, or genuinely do not want to think about a website again, Shopify or Squarespace can be the right call, and I will tell a client that directly if it is true for them. What I will not do is let someone believe $29 a month is the real number, or that renting is the same thing as owning.