Squarespace Pricing: How Much Does It Cost – And Is It Worth It?

If you decide to build your website on Squarespace, its pricing could set you back anything between $16 per month (if you want to keep it simple) and $61 per month (if you’re keen on making it fancy). Like the Capertee Valley, this is quite a big gap – and with the platform’s features making sure that the sky’s the limit for your ecommerce business, you may wonder if any of these options are worth your investment.

Lucky for you, here at Expert Market, we’re all about deep research and first-hand experience, so our analysis will help you find out where to start and which way to go from there. With Squarespace, not only have we decided to set up our own website with it to see what it does, we’ve also asked regular users to give it a go and report to us what did (or didn’t) tickle their fancy.

We then compiled and graded their findings on everything from features and user-friendliness to sales features and support. On value for money, Squarespace scored a solid 4.2 – one the best grades on this category in our research. This also puts Squarespace on par with one of its biggest competitors, Wix.

Whether you’re courting Squarespace already or have just started browsing for a website builder, this is a good place to delve into what your money will buy if you go for it – plus some pros and cons for good measure. Scroll down and find it all out.

Squarespace Pricing Plans: Each Plan Explained

If you want to enter the ecommerce game, a natural concern would be how much a website would cost you. For that reason, we went ahead and created this breakdown of the Squarespace pricing plans so you can easily reach a decision on whether any of them work for you or not. You’ll find the hard cost numbers on the table below – and if you want to know more about what these numbers will get you, just read ahead.

Overall, Squarespace offers plenty of features for business owners who really want to take care of their processes end-to-end in a full sweep. It combines great website design with solid marketing tools and multichannel integration. No wonder it’s one of the top scorers on both website features – 4.2 – and design functionalities – 3.9 – in our research into the best ecommerce platforms in Australia.

Squarespace Personal – $16 per month or $22 per month

Squarespace (Up Close and) Personal is, as the name suggests, very much tailored to personal websites. The platform’s cheapest tier offers a somewhat limited range of services when compared to the others, but if your goal is to showcase your work and publicise your contacts, it does the job.

• Paying monthly: $22 per month
• Paying annually: $16 per month

Like all Squarespace’s plans, this one comes with unlimited bandwidth, SEO features, mobile optimization, a free custom domain (for the first year) and an array of gorgeous templates to choose from. Overall, blogs, portfolios, showreels, and all sorts of personal projects fit this pricing tier like a glove.

But beware: Squarespace Personal does not support any fully-integrated ecommerce – nor does it allow you to accept donations, for that matter – so it’s definitely not the option if you plan on generating direct income from what’s on display on the website.

With that and the price tag in mind, we don’t think Squarespace’s Personal plan cuts it. Small projects will benefit from cheaper options, like Weebly (whose basic plan, Connect, starts at $7 per month in a yearly contract) and GoDaddy (whose cheapest plan costs $16 per month in the first year, and $19 afterwards). And if ecommerce is (or will be) the name of your game, then Squarespace’s other plans are better equipped to serve you. Of course, if you’d like to try this plan just to see how it looks like, head over to Squarespace and get cracking.

Squarespace Business – $25 per month or $35 per month

Squarespace’s second tier provides great value for money and the best of both worlds in the sense that, even without shelling out for a full-on ecommerce plan, you get many of the perks that would come with one.

• Paying monthly: $35 per month
• Paying annually: $25 per month (for us, a bargain)

Along with all the features of the Personal plan, Squarespace’s Business plan also includes a free Gmail and Google Workspace account (for the first year), complete customization with CSS and JavaScript (in English: you can add elements to make your website look super slick), and ecommerce integration. Plus, it works alongside various payment platforms: Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, and Stripe. If reading that makes you hear those cha-chings already, you can go ahead and fetch this plan on Squarespace‘s website.

However, depending on the size of your business, you should watch out for a very important detail: this plan comes with a 3% transaction fee on every online sale you make. If your sales are or will be occasional, that won’t pose a problem, but if you deal (or plan on dealing) with a high volume of sales, this isn’t the option for you. Instead, one of Squarespace’s Commerce tiers will suit you better.

Squarespace Basic Commerce – $34 per month or $40 per month

Big league time. Moving into the platform’s ecommerce arena, Squarespace Basic Commerce is geared towards online sales, and includes many features that should suit most businesses out there.

• Paying monthly: $34 per month
• Paying annually: $40 per month

For starters, Squarespace Basic Commerce does away with the transaction fee. Besides the ecommerce integration included in the Business plan, the Basic Commerce packs a punch when it comes to making your website look primed for sales. It allows your customers to create their own accounts, and to check out while still on your domain. They also get to see stock availability, other customers’ reviews, and related products.

On that note, on this plan, Squarespace gives you several tools through which you can monitor your best-selling items and sales trends, and bulk-manage inventory. You also get to check your visit-to-sale conversion rate and, through an in-built Facebook link, you’re able to sell your products directly on Instagram as well.

Considering the amount of features on this tier, it’s excellent for existing businesses that are keen on making the jump into online sales, or new businesses that have been based in the digital realm from the get-go. If your business ticks any of those boxes, just head to Squarespace and get started.

Squarespace Basic Commerce misses a few of the tools in the platform’s full arsenal – such as the ability to sell subscriptions – but these features are designed for more established online merchants anyway (we’ll get to them in a second, when we analyse Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce plan). If you’re just entering this arena, however, Basic Commerce should be your weapon of choice.

Squarespace Advanced Commerce – $52 per month or $61 per month

This one does what it says on the tin, really: Squarespace Advanced Commerce is the platform’s top tier, and comes with all the perks mentioned so far, plus some extras to really make your business zing.

• Paying monthly: $61 per month
• Paying annually: $52 per month

Among the specialised tools at your disposal, this plan allows you to sell subscriptions, set up email reminders for customers who left your website without purchasing, and automate discount offers at checkout.

For all its features, Squarespace Advanced Commerce is very much aimed at businesses that already have an online presence and are looking to expand. If yours is one of them, by all means visit Squarespace and sign up. Considering the cost, however, if you’re starting out in digital sales, you’re better off with the lower tiers, which will give you a good taste of the action but involve less bank-breaking.

Does Squarespace Have a Free Plan?

Speaking of bank-breaking, let’s tackle one hard money-related truth straight on: Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, so you will need to shell out to get your hands on it. That said, you can trial any of its plans for free for 14 days. After that time expires, you can even request a one-time seven-day extension if you contact Squarespace’s customer service team.

The trial is a good opportunity for you to try the plan that looks like the best fit for your business, and then grow or scale down accordingly when it comes to actually buying. Because of this, and the fact that it allows you to sample most of Squarespace’s features without having to commit, we recommend doing a trial.

Squarespace Fees and Costs: Billing Cycles, Ongoing Costs, and Hidden Fees

Squarespace is pretty clear about what it charges, so for the most part, you’re not in for any surprises. You can choose between paying monthly or yearly, and the discounts if you choose the latter are quite substantial, as costs get hefty on a month-to-month basis. Your subscription will renew automatically.

You should, however, watch out for the fees charged by the payment platform you choose to integrate, whether that’s Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, or Stripe. Squarespace nabs 3% of your sale on its Business plan, but otherwise, it either doesn’t allow for payments (as on the Personal plan) or doesn’t charge a transaction fee (as on the Commerce plans).

However, in any plan in which ecommerce integration is possible, the payment platform you use will take a bite – usually a percentage of the sale, plus a fixed fee. It varies from platform to platform – hence us not going into further detail here – but in any case, it’s worth checking out your payment platform’s fees so you don’t buy a specific Squarespace plan (especially the Commerce ones) thinking absolutely no fees are due.

Squarespace Scheduling Pricing: Should You Go For It?

Squarespace Scheduling is an extra service provided by the platform. It’s tailor-made for businesses that work with appointments. Clinical consultations, space rental, classes of any kind – it doesn’t matter: if a date and time needs to be booked, Squarespace Scheduling does the trick.

The thing to pay attention to is that this handy tool doesn’t come within Squarespace’s main pricing plans, so you would have to shell out a bit more to get it. Like those plans, however, you do get a discount (albeit not as big) if you bite the bullet and go with a yearly plan.

With Scheduling, you can choose between three tiers: Emerging, Growing and Powerhouse.

Emerging is perfect for small, personal businesses that don’t have various calendars or several team members inputting data. It allows calendar syncing with selected email providers, has ecommerce integration, and automates email reminders. It costs $22 month-to-month or $20 per month in a yearly plan.

Growing is geared towards businesses with more employees and locations. You can create and sync six calendars, handle bundled and recurring bookings, and send reminders via SMS as well as email. This one comes at $40 month-to-month or $37 per month in a yearly plan.

Finally, Powerhouse ups the ante when it comes to sheer volume of calendars: you can create a maximum of 36 (and sync them)! Plus, you have more room to personalise the scheduler with custom CSS. For this, you would pay $68 month-to-month or $74 per month if you go annually.

As far as value for money goes, Growing is the best plan. You get access to almost all of the tool’s features for about half the price of the costliest version. Powerhouse only makes sense if your business is a multi-location megachain, with all your locations taking appointments – in which case, congratulations!

Squarespace vs the Competition: Which Stands Out?

If you want to build a simple yet functional website without the need for it to look fresh off the runway, there are better options than Squarespace considering the investment involved. Its lowest price tag of $16 per month puts it at a disadvantage against cheaper competitors like Weebly or GoDaddy, which allow you to become a website owner without spending as much.

However, when ecommerce integration is thrown into the mix, Squarespace’s pricing really shines. It occupies a solid middle ground, which means it’s all out to satisfy most business-owners without costing a fortune – the 4.2 score it received on value for money from our customer surveys sums it up nicely.

Its pricing range of $16 to $61 offers a plethora of features that are aimed primarily at online growth. Because of this, and Squarespace’s limited stock monitoring functions, large online retailers will be better served by the highest pricing tiers of platforms such as BigCommerce or Shopify, as they’re designed for large retailers. However, our research shows that Squarespace is one of the one of the best platforms for small businesses in Australia.