Guide — August 26, 2026 [ sourced figures · dated at the source · hand-coded ]

What does a Wix website actually cost in a year?

Plans from $17 to $159 a month, plus the design and app fees the plan price leaves out — three worked scenarios, every outside figure checked at source with a date.

By Dmytro Veretelnikov, Founder

A Wix plan costs $204 to $1,908 a year, but the plan is not the bill. Add the design the plan does not include and the apps your features need, and an ordinary small business site lands near $756 a year. Below is where every dollar goes, with the source and date beside each figure so you can check them yourself.

Wix publishes its plan prices plainly, and that part is easy to look up. What makes the yearly number hard to predict is everything the plan price leaves out — and those pieces are not hidden so much as scattered across three different places.

The plans themselves

Monthly rates for the US line-up. Wix bills these as a yearly subscription paid in full up front, so the yearly column is what actually leaves your account on day one:

PlanPer monthPer yearStorageDomain
Free $0 $0 Wix subdomain, Wix ads
Light $17 $204 2 GB Free domain for 1 year
Core $29 $348 50 GB Free domain for 1 year
Business $39 $468 100 GB Free domain for 1 year
Business Elite $159 $1,908 Unlimited Free domain for 1 year

Read off wix.com/plans on 9 August 2026 from a US address. Wix serves different line-ups by region, so check yours from where you are — the same page requested from outside the US returns other numbers.

The free plan is real, and for a hobby page it is enough. For a business it is not: the address stays a Wix subdomain and Wix places its own ads on your pages. Anything you would put on a business card starts at the Light tier.

What the plan price does not buy: the design

A plan buys hosting and an editor. It does not buy a designed site. Either you take a template as it comes and accept that a competitor two towns over is using it too, or you pay someone — and Wix prints that price itself, because it runs the marketplace where those people list.

On 11 August 2026 that marketplace listed 1,701 professionals. The first page showed 24 cards quoting "starting at" figures from $99 to $1,990, with a median of $299.

Two caveats belong with that median or it misleads. Those are starting prices, which is the number before anyone has heard what you need. And 24 cards out of 1,701 is a first page, not a survey of the market. What the figure does establish is that design has a price on a builder too, and it belongs in any honest comparison.

What the plan price does not buy: the apps

Booking, reviews, advanced forms, an email list — on a platform each of these is an app with a monthly fee of its own. Rates inside the Wix App Market run from $2.49 to $14.99 a month for the marketing tools that print a price at all (11 August 2026).

Getting a realistic rate per job out of Wix is harder than it sounds, and the reason is worth stating: most listings do not show one. Four categories checked on 11 August 2026 — bookings showed 28 cards marked "Free plan available" or "Free to install" and just two with a price; reviews showed 70 cards with no price at all; forms 27; email 13. The tariff lives inside each app, behind an install.

So the rates below come from the Shopify App Store, where the price is printed on the card itself. This is a market rate per task, not a Wix price — the distinction matters and is why it is stated here rather than buried:

JobApp pricedPer monthWhere the free tier stops
Online booking Sesami $19 free tier exists; paid tier starts at 5 resources
Reviews Judge.me $15 Forever Free covers unlimited reviews
Advanced forms Powerful Form Builder $9.90 1 form, 40 submissions a month
Email and CRM Klaviyo $15 250 contacts, 150 SMS credits

That last column is the honest part. Free tiers are generous, and plenty of small sites pay nothing here for years. Reviews can be unlimited for free; a forms plugin covers one form and forty submissions a month; an email list is free to 250 contacts. You start paying at the moment the business grows — which is exactly when you can least afford a surprise.

Three scenarios, worked through

Same site, three honest ways to run it. The domain is free for the first year on any paid plan and becomes a separate subscription after that, so year one is cheaper than every year that follows:

ScenarioPlanApps / moYear oneEvery year after
Bare minimum
A few pages, no bookings, no store, no email list.
$17 $204 $211.90
Typical small business
Takes bookings and runs an email list past the free ceilings.
$29 $34 $756 $763.90
Fully equipped
Bookings, reviews, advanced forms and email, all on paid tiers.
$39 $58.90 $1,175 $1,182.70

Add the marketplace design fee once — median $299 — and the first year of a typical small business site on Wix is roughly $1,055. Domain renewal is the one figure nobody can quote for you: Wix lists a $7.90 starting price for a .com but sends you to your own account for the renewal rate, so treat $7.90 as a floor rather than a forecast.

When Wix is the cheaper answer, plainly

Under two or three years, a subscription usually wins on money, and pretending otherwise would be easy to check. If the site is for a season, an event, a test of an idea you might close, or a business still deciding what it is, $204 for a year is hard to argue with. The same goes if you want to change things yourself at eleven at night without emailing anyone.

The arithmetic only turns when the site stops being an experiment. On the typical scenario above, the rent adds up to about $4,111 over five years against $2,940 for a built site you own outright — the lines cross near 3.4 years, counting the design fee on the Wix side.

When a flat-rate build is the better deal

A fixed quote from a studio buys a different shape of cost: one number now, then almost nothing recurring. It makes sense past that crossing point, and in three situations it makes sense regardless of the horizon.

  • Speed is part of the product. Builders ship shared code so their editors can run in your browser. If customers arrive on phones and leave when a page stalls, that trade is not neutral.
  • The feature list keeps growing. Every new capability on a platform is another monthly line. In a build the same features are written into the scope once.
  • The site has to be an asset. Code and design files that transfer to you mean the site keeps working whatever happens to any one vendor — including us.

Our own numbers, so this page can be held to its own standard: $1,900 for a landing page, $2,900 for a multi-page business website, fixed in writing after a 5-minute brief and before any work starts. The wider comparison of both models is in one-time pricing versus a subscription, and what happens to a Wix site the day you stop paying is set out in Wix versus a custom website.

Want the number for your own scope rather than a scenario? The cost calculator runs on the same published price list and gives a range in about a minute — useful as a sanity check against any quote you receive, including ours.

FAQ

Questions this raises

Anything not covered here gets a written answer the same business day — ask by email.

How much does a Wix website cost per year?

It depends on which costs you count. The plan alone runs $204 to $1,908 a year, billed as a yearly subscription. A small business site that takes bookings and runs an email list lands nearer $756 a year once the apps those features need are on paid tiers, and a fully equipped site reaches about $1,175. Plan prices checked on wix.com/plans, 9 August 2026; app rates 11 August 2026, see the article for why they come from the Shopify App Store.

What does the Wix plan price not include?

Three things, and together they can double the bill. Design: the plan buys hosting and an editor, not a finished site — Wix runs its own marketplace where 1,701 professionals list "starting at" prices, median $299 across the 24 cards on the first page (checked 11 August 2026). Apps: features beyond the box are separate monthly subscriptions. Domain: free for the first year on any paid plan, then a paid subscription of its own.

Is Wix cheaper than hiring someone to build a site?

For the first year or two, yes, and by a wide margin. On the typical scenario in this article Wix runs about $756 a year against a one-time $2,900 for a built site. The lines cross at roughly 3.4 years once the marketplace design fee is counted on the Wix side. Below that horizon a subscription is the cheaper answer, and the article says so plainly.

Why do app prices in this article come from Shopify, not Wix?

Because Wix mostly does not print them. Four Wix App Market categories were checked on 11 August 2026: bookings showed 28 cards marked "Free plan available" or "Free to install" and only two with a price, reviews 70 cards with no price, forms 27, email 13 — the tariff lives inside each app. To show a realistic rate per job, the article uses Shopify App Store listings, where the price is printed on the card itself. That is a market rate per task, not a Wix price, and the difference is stated wherever the numbers appear.

Keep reading

Two more, same plain English

  1. August 20, 2026 What does a website redesign cost? Three different jobs share the name, and they cost different amounts — plus the three things a redesign can lose if nobody plans for them.
  2. August 20, 2026 How to choose a web designer for your small business The checks that take ten minutes, the six questions that belong in writing, and the red flags worth walking away from — including how to run them on us.

Rather get an exact number?

Send the 5-minute brief and the proposal comes back the same business day — fixed scope, fixed price.