Everyone's seen the ads.
"Build your dream website for just $23 a month." Clean templates, easy drag and drop, SSL included, maybe some AI magic to get you started fast. Sounds reasonable. Cheaper than a couple of takeout coffees a week, right?
Sure. Until you do the math.
Let's Talk About What You're Actually Spending
Most small businesses end up on a mid-tier Squarespace plan, somewhere between $23 and $39 a month, once you need actual features like scheduling, storage, or e-commerce basics.
Over three years that's $828 to $1,404. Just for the base plan.
Then the add-ons start stacking.
Professional email? $6 to $12 per user per month. Domain renewal after year one? $20 to $70 a year. Transaction fees on lower plans? Up to 3% per sale. Custom plugins or designer help when the template won't cooperate? Hundreds more.
Three years in, your "affordable" $23/month website has quietly cost you $1,500 to $3,000. Sometimes more.
Meanwhile a custom build, one-time cost, runs you $2,000 to $6,000 depending on what you need. After that? Maybe $100 to $300 a year for the basics. By year three you're ahead. By year five you're way ahead.
And you actually own the thing.
About That Ownership Problem
Here's the part that gets glossed over in every Squarespace ad.
You don't own your website. You're renting it.
Miss a payment? Your site goes dark. No warning, no grace period, just gone. No site, no leads, no nothing.
Want to leave? You can export your text content and blog posts, but not your design, your layout, your galleries, or your custom blocks. It's like moving out of an apartment but being forced to leave the furniture, the paint job, and all the wiring behind. You're basically starting over.
And Squarespace can raise prices, kill features, or change the rules whenever they want. You have zero say. You're a tenant, not an owner, and they're the landlord.
The Performance Problem Nobody Talks About
Squarespace has gotten better. I'll give them that. But shared hosting plus heavy templates still means slow load times, especially on mobile, especially on image-heavy pages.
We're talking 3 to 4 second mobile loads in a lot of cases. That sounds fine until you realize that a one second delay can drop your conversions by 7 to 20 percent. Bounce rates spike. People leave before they ever see your services, your portfolio, your contact form.
In 2026, Google ranks fast sites higher. AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend fast sites. A slow site isn't just annoying, it's invisible.
A custom static site built on Astro and Netlify loads in under two seconds. Standard. Not a flex, just the baseline.
Getting Out Is Expensive Too
The sneaky thing about Squarespace is that leaving gets harder the longer you stay.
You've spent time building everything out. Your URLs are set. Your galleries are organized. Your blog has 40 posts. Switching means remapping every URL so you don't tank your SEO, rebuilding your galleries from scratch, and potentially hiring someone to migrate everything without breaking your search rankings.
By year four or five a lot of people are paying Squarespace AND paying someone to help them escape. They stay trapped not because it's good but because leaving got too expensive.
That's not a coincidence. That's the business model.
What You Get When You Actually Own Your Site
I build custom sites on Astro, Sanity, and Netlify. Fast, clean, owned outright.
For businesses that don't need a CMS, lawyers, contractors, consultants, you get a pure static build. No database, no overhead, no babysitting. Set it and forget it. Loads fast, ranks well, converts better.
For creatives who need to update content regularly, photographers, bloggers, you get Sanity CMS on top of that. An easy dashboard to update galleries, add posts, swap out content, no code required after launch.
Either way you pay once, own it forever, and never have to worry about a platform hiking your rates or taking your site offline because a payment failed.
No digital landlord. No lock-in. No subscription machine quietly draining your account every month.
Red Willow Digital builds high-performance websites for Alberta small businesses. Based in Edmonton. Get a free audit and find out what your current site is actually costing you.