One-time pricing means you pay for the build once and own it: ours start at $1,900 for a landing page and $2,900 for a business website, with no platform fee afterwards. A subscription inverts that — from a few dollars a month, forever, and the site stops being yours to serve the moment the payments do. Neither is automatically right; what follows is the arithmetic and the failure mode of each.
What gets paid once, and what keeps coming back
The confusing part of website pricing is that both models have recurring costs — they are just different ones. Sorting them out first makes every comparison below easier to read.
| Cost | One-time build | Platform subscription |
|---|---|---|
| Design and build | Paid once | Template included; a designer is extra |
| Platform fee | None | Every month, for as long as the site is online |
| Domain | Yearly, yours | Yearly, often free for the first year |
| Hosting | Yearly or free tier, your account | Inside the plan |
| Apps for extra features | Built into the quote | Monthly, per app |
| Upkeep | Optional, from $95/month | You do it, or you pay someone |
| If you stop paying | The site keeps serving | The site reverts to the platform |
That last row is the one people discover late. A subscription is not a payment plan for a site you are buying — it is rent on a site the platform keeps.
What the platforms charge
Monthly rates for the main hosted platforms, so the recurring side has real numbers rather than a shrug. Read the billing note on each row: the same platform quotes different figures depending on whether you pay yearly or monthly, and WordPress.com prices the first year below the renewal.
| Platform | Entry | Mid | Business | Top | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | $17 | $29 | $39 | $159 | yearly rate, paid up front |
| Squarespace | $19 | $29 | $49 | $99 | yearly rate |
| Squarespace | $25 | $39 | $65 | $139 | month-to-month |
| WordPress.com | $4 → $6 | $8 → $10 | $25 → $30 | $45 → $57 | first year → renewal |
Wix rates read off wix.com/plans, whose page states its prices are “for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase”. Squarespace and WordPress.com figures are the US line-ups, checked at source on 11 August 2026 from a US address; requested from outside the US the same day, both platforms serve a different set — Squarespace returns three plans with no Plus tier, and WordPress.com quotes in euros. Check yours from where you are.
Apps: the row people forget to add up
The row above deserves its own paragraph, because it is where subscription budgets break. Booking, reviews, advanced forms, email and CRM, extra languages — on a platform each is an app with a monthly fee of its own. The rates here were read on 11 August 2026 off Shopify's app store, picked because that marketplace prints the price on the listing itself; take them as the market rate per job, not as a line on any one platform's invoice. Booking from $19, reviews from $15, forms from $9.90, email from $15.
Free tiers blunt that, and it would be dishonest not to say so: reviews can be unlimited for nothing, forms are free up to 40 submissions a month, email up to 250 contacts, one language costs nothing. Small sites genuinely pay zero here. So the number worth budgeting is a range. Bill only what an ordinary workload pushes past a free ceiling — booking, whose free tier ends at five resources, and email, whose free list ends at 250 contacts — and it is $34 a month, $408 a year. Pay for all four and it is $58.90 a month, $706.80 a year. Either way it sits on top of the plan, and either way the fees arrive with growth. On a build the same features are written once into the scope — a custom design and build is where that lands when the feature list is unusual.
The line item the subscription price hides
A plan buys hosting and an editor, not a designed site. Either you take a template as it comes or you pay someone — and on Wix that price is published, because the platform runs its own marketplace for it. On 11 August 2026 it listed 1,703 professionals, and the first page of 24 quoted “starting at” figures from $10 to $1,990, median $190.
Treat that median as a snapshot rather than a rate card: those are starting prices, 24 cards are a first page and not the marketplace, and the listing reshuffles — the same page a day earlier gave a median of $299. What it does establish is that the design step has a price on a builder too, and it belongs on the subscription side of any honest comparison.
The day the payments stop
This is where the two models stop resembling each other. Wix documents its own behaviour plainly: after cancellation the site address reverts to a free Wix URL and Wix ads appear, while the content itself is not deleted. Hosted platforms work this way by design — you are paying for the site to be served, so payment is what keeps it served.
A build you own fails differently, which is to say it mostly doesn't. Stop paying us and nothing happens to the site: the code and design files transferred to you on final payment, the hosting account is in your name, and the domain is yours. The worst case is that updates stop until you pick them up or hand them to someone else. For the detail on one platform in particular — the year-by-year arithmetic, the export matrix, what the help centre actually says — see Wix vs a custom website.
When renting is the better call
A one-time build is not the right answer to every website, and pretending otherwise would be easy to see through. Choose the subscription when:
- The horizon is short — an event, a season, a six-month experiment you expect to close.
- The whole budget for the site is under $500, where nothing worth having gets built.
- You want to make every change yourself, tonight, without emailing anyone.
- You are still deciding what the business is, and the site will be rewritten twice before it settles.
In all four the subscription is cheaper, faster and reversible, and the ownership argument is beside the point. The trade only turns when the site becomes something you rely on.
What one-time pricing looks like here
Fixed written quotes, agreed before anything starts, with the code and design files yours on final payment. Prices start at $1,900 for a single landing page, $2,900 for a multi-page business website, $3,400 for an online store, and $5,000 where the work is a custom design and build. After launch the only optional cost is a care plan from $95/month, with no minimum term.
Want the wider picture with market ranges rather than only our numbers? How much a small business website costs puts builders, freelancers and agencies side by side. Ready to price your own? The cost calculator gives you a range in a minute, and the 5-minute brief comes back with a fixed number the same business day.