Wix vs Squarespace vs Hiring a Developer: The Real Cost, Including Your Time

Before we start, you should know my bias: I build websites for a living. When I compare Wix and Squarespace against hiring a developer, I have an obvious financial interest in one of those answers. So I am going to do something most comparison posts won't. I am going to tell you, clearly and early, when the builders are the right choice. Because sometimes they are, and pretending otherwise would make everything else in this post worthless.

What I want to fix is the math everyone uses. Almost every "Wix vs Squarespace vs hiring a designer" comparison counts the subscription fee and stops there. That number is real, but it is the smallest number in the equation. The biggest cost of a DIY website is your time, and nobody puts your time in the comparison table. Let's do that.

When is Wix or Squarespace the right answer?

Honestly, fairly often. If any of these describe you, use a builder and don't look back.

You're testing an idea. If you are not sure your business concept works yet, do not pay anyone to build you a website. A free or cheap builder site, or even a simple link-in-bio page, is exactly the right tool for validating demand.

You genuinely have zero budget. A rough website beats no website. If $1,000 would come out of your grocery money, take the DIY route, get something live, and upgrade later when revenue exists.

It's a hobby or side project. A blog about your hiking trips does not need custom code. Squarespace templates are genuinely pretty, and pretty is all a hobby site needs to be.

You enjoy this stuff and have slow seasons. Some owners actually like tinkering with their website, and if you have quiet months where your time has low opportunity cost, building your own site can be satisfying and fine.

If that's you, close this tab and go build. No hard feelings. The rest of this post is for owners whose website needs to bring in customers, and whose hours are worth real money.

What do Wix and Squarespace actually cost?

The advertised prices are accurate, with two asterisks. As of 2026, Wix's premium plans run from $17/month (Light) to $29 (Core), $39 (Business), and $159/month (Business Elite) when billed annually. Pay month to month and those numbers jump to roughly $24 to $172, per Tooltester's current breakdown. Squarespace's plans go from $16/month (Basic) to $23 (Core), $39 (Plus), and $99/month (Advanced) on annual billing; the Basic plan is $25 if you pay monthly, per Website Builder Expert.

Asterisk one: the price you see in ads is almost always the annual-commitment price. Asterisk two: the free custom domain both platforms dangle covers year one only. After that you pay roughly $15 to $18 per year to renew it on Wix, according to Site Builder Report.

For a real small business, the honest tier is the middle one. So call it $23 to $29 per month. Over three years, that's $828 to $1,044 in subscription fees alone, before apps, email, or domain renewals.

That's the small number. Here's the big one.

What is your time actually worth?

The typical owner spends 15 to 40 hours getting a DIY site to a state they'd show a customer. That range comes up again and again in accounts of the DIY experience, and it matches what my own clients tell me about their abandoned Wix drafts. The "quick afternoon project" becomes three weekends of fighting a template: choosing it, second-guessing it, cropping photos, writing copy, moving boxes around, discovering the mobile view broke, fixing the mobile view.

Now price those hours. If you run a business, your working hour is worth something concrete. Whatever you bill, whatever revenue an hour of sales calls generates, whatever you'd pay someone to cover for you. For most owners that's $50/hour at minimum, and usually more.

Take the middle of the range: 25 hours at $50/hour is $1,250 of your time. Before the subscription. And it doesn't stop at launch. Builders need ongoing fiddling: seasonal updates, a new photo gallery, the banner that won't align. Call it one hour a month, which is conservative. That's another 36 hours over three years.

A developer doesn't remove your involvement entirely, to be fair. You still spend a few hours gathering content, giving feedback on a draft, and reviewing the result. I budget about five hours of client time for a typical small business site.

The 3-year math, side by side

Here's the comparison table I wish existed when owners ask me this question. Time is priced at $50/hour; double it if your hour is worth $100, the conclusion gets stronger, not weaker.

	Wix / Squarespace (mid plan)	Freelance developer	Agency
Cash, 3 years	$830–$1,050 subscription + ~$35 domain renewals	$1,000–$3,000 build + ~$100–$400 hosting/domain	$5,000–$15,000 build + maintenance plan
Your hours	15–40 setup + ~36 upkeep	~5–10	~10–20 (meetings, approvals)
Your time at $50/hr	$2,550–$3,800	$250–$500	$500–$1,000
Real 3-year total	$3,400–$4,900	$1,350–$3,900	$5,500–$16,000+
You own the result	No — it lives on their platform	Yes, code and all	Usually, check the contract

Read that middle column again. A $1,000 done-for-you website, plus cheap hosting, plus a handful of your hours, frequently costs less over three years than the "cheap" DIY option. Not less than the agency. Less than Wix. The subscription was never the real price; your evenings were.

Agency pricing deserves its own sentence: in Montreal, typical small business quotes run $5,000 to $15,000 CAD per local pricing guides. Agencies make sense for complex projects with big teams and big stakes. For a five-page site, you're paying for account managers and process, not better code.

What does builder marketing leave out?

Four things, mostly.

You can't take your site with you. This is the one that surprises people most, so I'll quote the platforms themselves. Wix's help center states plainly that it is not possible to export files, pages or sites created with the Wix Editor to another host. Squarespace lets you export an XML file with blog posts and basic page text, but your design, styles, custom CSS, and most page types stay behind. In practice, leaving either platform means rebuilding from scratch. After three years and 60 hours of tweaking, that's a painful sentence to read.

The "free" plan advertises them, not you. Wix's free tier puts your site on a wixsite.com subdomain and displays Wix ads on every page, as Site Builder Report documents. For a hobby that's fine. For a business, a banner telling customers your site was free is worse than no site.

SEO is workable but capped. You can absolutely rank a builder site for easy keywords, and both platforms have improved here. But you're trading control for convenience: you get limited say over page speed, code bloat, and the technical details that decide competitive local searches like "plumber Montreal." When every competitor has a template site, that ceiling doesn't matter. When one of them has a fast custom site with proper structure, it does.

Your site looks like everyone else's. Thousands of businesses picked the same twenty popular templates you're choosing from. Customers may not consciously notice. They do notice that nothing about your site feels specific to you.

When does hiring a developer actually win?

When the website has a job to do beyond existing. Concretely, hiring wins when you need custom features (booking logic, quoting calculators, integrations with the tools you already run), when you're competing on local search and need every technical SEO advantage you can get, when speed matters (custom-coded sites are simply lighter than builder output), and when you want to own the asset. That last one is underrated. A custom site is a folder of code that belongs to you. Host it anywhere, hand it to any future developer, sell it with the business. No platform can raise the rent on it.

And there's the quieter reason from the table above: your hours go back to you. The weeks you'd spend wrestling a template are weeks spent on sales, customers, or your family. For most owners past the validation stage, that alone covers the fee.

The catch, historically, was the gap in the market. Under $500 gets you template mills and Fiverr roulette. Above $5,000 you're in agency territory. The middle was empty for a long time, which is exactly why I price the way I do: I build custom-coded small business sites for a flat $1,000, delivered in 7 days, and you own all of it. That's one option among several, and plenty of good freelancers price in the $1,000 to $3,000 range. The point stands regardless of who you hire.

So which one should you pick?

Match the tool to the stage of your business.

Still validating, zero budget, or building something personal? Use Wix or Squarespace. Genuinely. They are good products for that job, and the lock-in doesn't hurt when there's nothing yet to lock in.

Running a real business where the website should produce customers? Do the full math before you decide. Subscription plus your hours, over three years, against a flat fee plus a handful of your hours. For most owners I meet, the "expensive" option turns out to be the cheap one, and the "free" option turns out to cost about four grand in evenings.

Either way, count your time. It's the only line item you can't buy more of.