Squarespace Pricing: Plans, Deals, Upsells and Hidden Costs

Squarespace pricing starts at $16 per month, and offers a total of four pricing plans that can get as expensive as $49 per month. Squarespace costs aren't as low as some competitors, but given the superior features and excellent design functionality, we found Squarespace offers fantastic value, particularly for online stores.

We've spent hundreds of hours researching the website builder market to help you find the best deal. If you want to find out exactly what kind of website builder will fit your needs, check out our handy website builder quiz to be matched up with a provider based on your specific criteria.

In this Guide:

• Squarespace Pricing Plans
• Can I Get Squarespace for Free?
• Squarespace Domain Hosting Costs
• Additional Hidden Costs
• Squarespace at a Glance
• Squarespace Pricing vs Competitors
• About Our Research
• Frequently Asked Questions

How Much Does Squarespace Cost?

Squarespace pricing offers four different plans that range in cost from $16 per month to $49 per month. There is no free plan, but there is a 14-day free trial. Here's a breakdown of each pricing plan available from Squarespace:

• Personal ($16 per month) – the best choice if you're creating a blog, portfolio, or very small business site.
• Business ($23 per month) – a great value plan for small businesses.
• Basic Commerce ($27 per month) – a superb low price for creating an online store.
• Advanced Commerce ($49 per month) – everything you need for creating a larger-scale ecommerce site.

It might not seem as cheap as some of the other best website builders for ecommerce we've tested, especially when you’re first starting out, but Squarespace has a fantastic range of features available – even on its cheapest plan.

Chances are, if you’re after a high-quality website, Squarespace will be worth it. In fact, Squarespace – along with Wix – were the best two website builders our researchers tested and excelled in a number of key areas such as design, marketing, and usability when they were put through their paces.

Squarespace is currently offering a further 10% off website plans. Simply use the code TECHCO10 at checkout to claim this deal and a 14-day free trial.

Which Squarespace pricing plan is right for you?

To help you understand those prices and features even further, it helps to think in terms of what type of website you're aiming to build. Here's a breakdown of which Squarespace pricing plan is best suited to which type of website:

• If you want to make a blog – Choose the Personal plan, as you’ll get unlimited storage for photos and website metrics
• If you want to sell products online – You’ll need the Basic Commerce plan at least. There are no transaction fees, and you can sell an unlimited amount of products
• If you want to create a site for your small business – We’d opt for the Business Websites plan. You get professional email, and the ability to create promotional pop-ups and announcement bars to help you make sales. You also get access to Squarespace's new drag-and-drop editor, fluid engine, which was added in June 2023.
• If you want to run a website for a club or group – The Personal plan should suit you just fine – and with unlimited bandwidth thrown in, you’ll never worry about your site going down
• If you want to create a portfolio – Again, we’d go for the Personal plan. Unlimited storage is great for uploading videos, images or audio to advertise your work
• If you run a subscriptions business, like a magazine – You’ll need the Advanced Commerce plan. Squarespace is currently the only website builder to offer subscription sales

If you're planning on using Squarespace to build a website for your business, you're doing the right thing. The provider is known for its mobile editor functionality, and with nearly three out of every four dollars spent on online purchases today is done so through a mobile device, it's safe to say that kind of functionality is important.

Squarespace Standard Website Plans

Squarespace offers two pricing plans for website building without ecommerce: Personal and Business.

Squarespace Personal Plan

The Personal Plan is Squarespace’s cheapest pricing plan, costing $16 per month if you choose annual billing. Pay for it monthly, however, and that price jumps to $23 per month.

For this, you’ll get access to a fully featured website with unlimited storage for uploading images and videos, and unlimited bandwidth to make sure everyone can visit your site.

Your website will be fully mobile-optimized, thanks to Squarespace’s industry-leading templates, and you’ll get SSL security included, so your users will see the reassuring padlock in their browser. Also thrown in are website metrics and 24/7 help and support. What's more, you'll get a free custom domain name and you'll be able to have two contributors working on your site.

If you’re looking to build a website for a small club, hobby, blog, or portfolio, the Personal plan is a great choice.

As far as how it compares, the Personal plan from Squarespace is the exact same price as the Light plan from Wix, both considered to be accessible starter plans. They're both a bit more expensive than other options like Hostinger, but the features they provide make these starter plans an excellent value.

Squarespace Business Plan

The Business Plan is designed for companies that don't need to sell products online but still need an impressive, high-quality website. It was one of the more impressive plans (at this price point) that our research team tested.

It costs $23 per month when paid annually or $33 per month when billed monthly and offers some juicy extras when compared to the Personal Plan.

For a start, you'll be able to register unlimited contributors to your site — almost essential for businesses with more than a handful of employees. Plus, you'll be able to get a professional email from Google, featuring your site's custom domain name rather than @gmail.com. You'll also get access to shared calendars (useful for planning meetings), access to Google Drive, and improved support.

The Business Plan's other huge advantage over the Personal Plan is its advanced website metrics. This means you'll be able to analyze how users find and interact with your website in order to make improvements to its design, increase sales and make more money. You’ll also be able to access a selection of tools to encourage customers to visit your store or place an order. You get $100 of Google Ad credit to help attract customers to your site, as well as access to promotional pop-ups and an announcement bar to make your offers even more enticing.

You get access to more tools and design elements to give your site more functionality. For example, you can connect apps that allow customers to place orders and make reservations and use these forms to add records to your customer database. You'll also be able to show off any products you sell on Instagram with links directly to your store. Finally, you'll get access to the CSS and JavaScript code that your site is based on in case you need to do any really fancy editing and be able to use Squarespace's new Fluid Engine editor — giving users granular levels of control over their site.

For small bricks-and-mortar shops or services businesses, the Business plan is ideal.

For basic ecommerce functionality, the $23 per month price tag from Squarespace compares favorably to other options, as you won't get any online store features until you pay $27 per month for Wix. Still, you'll be saddled with that 3% transaction fee, which you won't find on Wix, so you have to take that into account.

Squarespace Ecommerce Plans

Squarespace offers two pricing plans for ecommerce website building: Basic and Advanced.

Squarespace Basic Commerce Plan

The Basic Commerce plan costs $27 per month when paid annually or $36 per month when billed monthly — you will also pay no transaction fees on any sales.

This plan gives you a lot of functionality for its cost. Squarespace has hiked all their plan costs since 2021, but they have only raised the Basic plan's cost by a dollar a month. This is by far the lowest price increase, and it's a sign that Squarespace wants to keep drawing in new ecommerce customers with a particularly good deal on the Basic plan.

For example, you get a fully mobile-optimized checkout on your own site and improved commercial metrics to identify any pain points your users are finding with your site.

Find out more: Squarespace for Ecommerce Review

You also get access to integrated accounting and label printing services, provided by specialists that have partnered with Squarespace. This makes it super easy to keep your stall in order.

At $27 per month, the Basic Commerce plan is identical to the Wix Core plan, which also offers ecommerce functionality. There are some notable differences, though. For one, Wix offers abandoned cart recovery at this price point while Squarespace doesn't. But Squarespace does allow for product reviews in this plan, which Wix doesn't.

All that to say, with pricing being so similar, it's all about what kind of features you want.

Squarespace Advanced Commerce Plan

The Advanced Commerce plan is Squarespace's most expensive plan. It costs $49 per month when billed annually or $65 per month when billed monthly.

While you might wince at that price, don’t forget that Squarespace’s excellent site design and features will be helping you make way more money than that.

You get all the features from the Basic Commerce plan, plus:

• Abandoned cart auto-recovery
• Advanced shipping rate calculations for USPS, FedEx, and UPS
• Flexible discounts to specific order values, or limited use or time promotions
• The ability to sell digital gift cards
• Access to the Orders API, which allows you to build custom integrations with third-party services for order fulfillment and production logistics
• Subscription sales for recurring product orders

This extra level of functionality means that you’ll be able to offer a complete ecommerce experience with remarkable ease. If your business is selling products, this is the best way to go about it.

Squarespace is great for a lot of reasons, but as an enterprise-level online store provider, it could do better. Shopify, for example, has a $29 per month plan that offers more robust options, including inventory management, which might be a better fit. Still, if design is your priority, stick with Squarespace and just accept that inventory management isn't in the cards for you.

Can I Use Squarespace for Free?

Yes, you can use Squarespace for free – but only for 14 days.

That might seem like a shame, but as we’ve spoken about elsewhere, free website builders are far from ideal. You’ll have a very limited feature set, your site will be littered with ads, and there’s a high chance you won’t actually be able to publish your website at all.

Squarespace’s 14-day free trial, though, gives you the chance to try-before-you-buy. You’ll be able to set up your site exactly to your liking, and when the 14 days are up, you’ll be able to publish it straight away.

However, we found in our research that the ecommerce features were extremely limited in the free trial, which means you aren't going to get a good feel for its online store functionality before you buy. Overall, we found that ecommerce functionality to be good and easy to use for smaller businesses with traditional businesses, because the lack of customizability hampers any significant changes.

Squarespace at a Glance

With an overall research score of 4.8/5, Squarespace is one of the best website builders we've tested due to its excellent design functionality, comparable only to fellow market-leader Wix in terms of the powerful features on offer. The main difference between Wix and Squarespace is that Wix is slightly easier to use, whereas Squarespace prioritizes design features.

In our research, some of the most impressive aspects of Squarespace beyond its design functionality were its simple, comprehensive reporting tools, which all you to view website data all in a custom dashboard, and multi-channel selling functionality, providing simple setup for discounts, email campaigns, social integration, and payment options.

Squarespace is always updating its platform, which makes creating a website even easier. In May 2023, for example, the company added a new feature called Squarespace Blueprint, a “guided website design system providing professionally curated layout and styling options.”

Squarespace Domain Hosting Costs

Every website has a domain name. Ours, for example, is Tech.co.

Without a domain name, you won’t have a website – and while it is something you have to pay for, it’s not something that costs a lot of money. With Squarespace, when you pay for your website plan annually, you get a free domain for a year.

When your year’s free domain ends, you’ll need to pay for it on a monthly or yearly basis, and it can be renewed from within your Squarespace account. Domains typically cost somewhere between $20-50 per month, depending on what top-level domain you go for (.com, .org, .me, etc.)

So, this means that a Personal Plan website with a year’s hosting could cost about $165, or $13.75 per month. And, considering that you get unlimited storage and bandwidth on all Squarespace plans, that’s far from a bad deal.

Squarespace Additional Hidden Costs

As with most website builders, there's a bit more to Squarespace's pricing plans than meets the eye. There are often hidden fees with website builders that can make running your website more expensive than you might have originally thought, such as contract length, hosting, and transaction fees for online stores.

Custom domain

As mentioned above, you get a free custom domain for one year, even on Squarespace's cheapest pricing plan, if you pay for a year upfront with an annual plan.

The custom domain will auto-renew at Squarespace's standard rate after this period — typically around $20-40 per year.

You might be able to find a cheaper solution by choosing a custom host (we like InMotion or BlueHost), after your years ends, if you don't mind the hassle of moving.

Email

While you do get Gmail free on the Business Plan, you only get one account. Plus Google's email solution isn't the best for sending mass marketing emails.

If you want to add another Gmail account, for example if you have more than one employee, you'll need to sign up for a professional email service separately.

If you want to do some email marketing, however, you'll need a dedicated solution. And preferably one that integrates fully with your website for easy analysis.

This means you might want need to pay for a premium Squarespace extension with a company such as MailChimp. Squarespace does offer its own Email Campaigns tool, but this only has a limited set of free features included.

Payment processing fees

There is a 3% transaction fee if you opt for the Business plan. However, Squarespace does not charge transaction fees on its Basic Commerce or Advanced Commerce plans, a perk that is definitely not available with many other website builders.

However, if you decided to use Squarespace for ecommerce, you will find that the companies that process your payments will charge a fee. Squarespace has no control over this, but it does have some preferred partner companies, such as Square (which is different to Squarespace — confusing, we know) which might make it easier or cheaper.

Squarespace Pricing vs Competitors

When it comes to price, Squarespace boasts some serious value, particularly compared to its website building competitors.

For starters, Squarespace maintains its high score of 4.8/5, which is tied for the top spot with Wix as the best website builder available. This is largely due to Squarespace's impressive feature catalog, combined with its robust design functionality, allowing for plenty of flexibility while still looking amazing.

Check out our Wix pricing guide for more information

As for how it compared to other website builders on value, Squarespace is hard to beat. Both have the same starting price at $16 per month, but Squarespace offers a bit more value in its less expensive plans.

Squarespace looks relatively affordable when it comes to ecommerce as well. Shopify, for example, costs $29 per month on its cheapest plan, before rising to $79 per month. Squarespace's ecommerce plans, meanwhile, start at only $27 per month and are capped at $49 per month. While Squarespace doesn't quite match the features of Shopify and Wix, we can confidently say it's still pretty great for ecommerce.

Check out our Shopify pricing guide for more information

Simply put, Squarespace is one of our top-rated website builders for small businesses and ecommerce, so you can rest easy knowing you've made the right choice. Still, if it doesn't suit your particularly needs, you can check out the bevy of other options in the table below or check out our best website builders guide here.

About Our Research

At Tech.co, we take our reviews of business software quite seriously. In fact, our team has spent hundreds of hours putting website builders and tools to the test in service of providing our readers with actionable insights that can make the decision process that much easier in the long run.

For website builders, we have a specific set of criteria by which we rate and ranking our top providers. The metrics we use to review Squarespace and its pricing, for example, include business features, design functionality, ease of use, customer support, and pricing.

To learn more about our process for reviewing business software, have a glance at our research guide to verify how hard we work to provide you with this information.

*Use code TECHCO10 for a 10% discount off all Squarespace plans

Squarespace Pricing FAQs