Wix vs a custom website: what you pay, what you own

Wix costs $17 to $159 a month, billed yearly, with hosting and a first-year domain included. A custom site is a one-time build you keep. Over three years Wix is the cheaper option by a wide margin — on the Core plan the lines only cross in year 9. The real difference isn't the money. It's what you're holding at the end, and what happens the month you stop paying.

This is a comparison written by people who build the custom side, so here is the bias up front: we sell one of these two things. What follows is still the honest version, because the numbers are checkable and the awkward ones are in it. Every Wix figure below was read off wix.com and its help centre on 9 August 2026 — not from a review site, because pricing pages change and round-ups go stale quietly.

What Wix charges, and what that buys

Five tiers, from a free plan on a Wix subdomain to Business Elite. The prices shown on the plans page are yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase, so the monthly figure is a rate, not a monthly bill:

Checked on wix.com/plans, 9 August 2026. The page states: “Displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase.” Wix quotes in USD; confirm the figure in your own country before budgeting.

Two details in that table do more work than the headline rate. The first is free domain for 1 year, which appears on every paid tier — the domain is free once, then becomes its own subscription. The second is storage: 2 GB on Light is a real ceiling for a photo-led site, and it is the usual reason a business that thought it was on a $17 plan is actually on a $29 one.

The arithmetic over ten years

Here is the part most comparisons skip, because it doesn't flatter the custom side. Subscription against one-time build, compounded, including the domain on both sides — free for the first year on Wix, paid from year two, at the $8 a year a .com starts at on their own pricing page. Hosting on our side is $0: these sites sit on Cloudflare's free tier.

Read it plainly: the Core plan stays the cheaper way to have a website until year 9, and on Light it stays cheaper past the ten-year mark. At three years — a realistic horizon for a small business — Wix Core has cost about $1,060 and the build about $2,924. That is not close.

One caveat on our own figure, since it cuts against us: $2,900 is a starting price for a business website, and a bigger build costs more, which pushes the crossing further out. Wix's side has an unknown too — the renewal price of the domain from year two isn't published; their help centre tells you to look it up inside your own account, so we used the starting price as the lowest honest number.

What the plan price doesn't buy

A plan buys hosting and the editor. It does not buy a designed site, and that is the line item missing from the chart above. On a builder there are two honest routes: take a template as it comes, or pay someone to make it yours. Wix runs a marketplace for the second one, so the price is not a matter of opinion — it is published.

On 11 August 2026 that listing showed 1,701 professionals. The first page of 24 quoted “starting at” figures from $99 to $1,990, median $299. Two caveats that matter: those are starting prices, so a real project lands higher, and 24 cards are a first page, not the whole marketplace.

Put the median back into the arithmetic and the crossing moves. Against our $2,900 plus domain, a Core plan carrying a $299 design solves as ($2,900 + $8 − $299) ÷ $348 ≈ 7.5 years, so the lines meet during year 8 rather than year 9. On Business it moves from year 7 to year 6.

Building it yourself is the third answer, and a legitimate one: it costs time instead of money. The same trade across platforms — what is paid once, what is paid monthly — is set out in one-time pricing for a business website. Plenty of businesses make that trade deliberately, and the chart above is exactly their case — no design line, because they are the designer.

Marketplace figures read off wix.com/marketplace/hire/web-design, 11 August 2026.

The second line the plan price doesn't carry: apps

Booking, reviews, advanced forms, email marketing, multiple languages — on a platform these are apps, each with its own monthly fee stacked on top of the plan. Wix runs a marketplace for them: on 11 August 2026 its marketing category listed apps from $2 to $15 a month apiece.

To put an order of magnitude on a full set rather than a single app, here are the current rates for four common jobs, read the same day off the app listings themselves — and, just as importantly, where each one's free tier runs out:

The Wix range above is from its own App Market on 11 August 2026. The four per-job rates are not: on the same day, the cards in Wix's booking, reviews, forms and email categories mostly read “Free plan available” or “Free to install”, with the paid tier priced inside the app rather than on the listing. The four rates come from Shopify's app store, where the price sits on the card — read them as what each job rents for on the market, not as a Wix invoice.

Two honest qualifications. Which apps you need depends entirely on the business: a one-page site for a plumber may need none of them. And the free tiers are real — Judge.me carries unlimited reviews at no cost, and a low-traffic form or a 250-contact list costs nothing either. The fees start when the business outgrows those ceilings, which is exactly when it can least afford surprises.

So the honest figure is a range, not a single number. At the lean end you pay only where an ordinary workload runs past a free ceiling — booking, because the free tier stops at five resources, and email, because 250 contacts is a short list: $34 a month, $408 a year. At the full end all four are paid: $58.90 a month, $706.80 a year — more than the $348 Core plan itself.

Fold each end into the crossing alongside the design. Lean: ($2,900 + $8 − $299) ÷ ($348 + $408) ≈ 3.5 years. Full: the same numerator ÷ ($348 + $706.80) ≈ 2.5 years. A Core plan meets an owned build during year 4 at the lean end and year 3 at the full one, against year 9 for the plan on its own. Even the middle case makes the point without help: drop reviews alone, since Judge.me really is free without limit, and the crossing is 2.98 years — still inside year 3.

On our side those same jobs are quoted once, inside the build. Booking is the clearest example: the studio runs its own booking product, so a booking flow is something we write into the site rather than rent monthly. The same goes for a product configurator — there is one live on the GebaShop store — and for a bilingual admin, built for that same project. None of those carry a monthly licence. Where the feature list is that specific, it is a custom design and build rather than a plan plus a stack of apps.

The day the payments stop

This is where renting and owning stop being an abstraction, so it's worth stating exactly what Wix says happens, in their words. Two subscriptions are involved, and they end differently.

Three things in there are worth reading twice. The refund window is fourteen days and applies to first-time purchases only — “The refund policy does not apply to renewals or cancellations after the 14 day period”, which means a yearly plan that renews on you is not refundable, and Wix notes the renewal can run up to three weeks before the expiry date. The site itself survives: “canceling your plan does not delete your site content”. And the domain has its own clock, with a redemption fee that Wix says “can vary depending on a number of factors”.

Quotations above are verbatim from support.wix.com, 9 August 2026.

None of this is sharp practice — it is a normal subscription, spelled out clearly in their help centre, and it is roughly what any hosted platform does. It is simply the thing to know before you build eight years of content on it. On an owned build the same event is duller: you stop paying us, and the site keeps serving, because the files are yours and the hosting bill is separate from the people who wrote it.

What you can take with you

“Can I export my site?” has a specific answer rather than a yes or a no, and the specifics matter if you ever move. Here is what Wix documents, feature by feature:

Put together: you leave with your words, your photos and your product data, and you leave the website behind. That is not a Wix flaw, it's the shape of every hosted builder — the design and the page structure are the platform's, which is exactly what you're paying it to handle for you. Worth knowing that a move means a rebuild, not a transfer.

Speed: the part everyone gets wrong

The “builders are slow” line is out of date, and we'd rather say so than repeat a talking point that sells for us. In the HTTP Archive sample of June 2026, 80.1% of Wix sites on mobile passed Core Web Vitals — 150,963 of 188,505 measured. That is field data from real visits, and it's a good result by any standard.

Sample date June 2026, from the HTTP Archive technology report, pulled 9 August 2026.

So the honest version of our advantage is narrower than the usual pitch. A hand-built page ships only its own code, which is why we hold a 100/100 PageSpeed target and, on the SEO category, every site we ship measures 100/100 — median of three runs each, 11 August 2026. On the other categories we publish what the run gave us, per project, in the measured scorecards on the case studies rather than claiming a number. Compare like with like when you're deciding: run your own pages through PageSpeed Insights, then run ours. A platform average tells you nothing about the page you're actually shipping — and a slow site on any platform is usually fixable without moving.

Where Wix is the better buy

We turn this work down often enough to have a list. Stay on Wix, or start there, if any of these is you:

• Your budget for the site is under $500. Nothing we could build for that would be worth having.
• You need it live this weekend, and “live and imperfect” beats “right in three weeks”.
• You want to change the text yourself at 11pm without emailing anyone or learning a tool.
• The venture is an experiment with a six-month horizon and you'd rather find out cheaply.
• You genuinely enjoy building it — some people do, and it's a bad reason to hire out.

The free-domain-for-a-year detail makes the first year cheap enough that testing an idea on Wix costs about what a decent dinner does. That's a real advantage and we're not going to argue with it.

Where a custom build pays for itself

The other side of the same list. Building makes sense when the website is doing a job that the subscription can't price:

• The site is how customers find and choose you, so a ranking or conversion gain outruns the fee.
• You need something templates don't do — a configurator, unusual booking logic, a bilingual back office.
• You want the asset on your side of the ledger: code and design files transfer to you on final payment.
• You'd rather hand upkeep to someone on a care plan than manage a platform yourself.

That's what a custom business website is for, from $2,900, or $1,900 for a single landing page. If you want the wider view including Squarespace, we wrote Wix and Squarespace vs a custom website; for the money side across every route, how much a small business website costs has the full range. To price your own scope against these figures, the cost calculator runs on the same published list.

Not sure which column you're in? Send us the site and what it needs to do in a 5-minute brief. If the answer is “stay on Wix”, we'll say that, and you'll have it in writing to point at later.