Squarespace Pricing and Fees (2024) — What’s the Best Plan?

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In this guide to Squarespace pricing, I take a look at how its fees structure works and discuss the pros and cons of each plan. Which one is best for you?

If you’re thinking of using Squarespace as your website builder or online store, you’ll know that there are several different pricing plans to consider — and you might be wondering which one is the best fit for your business, and which offers the best value for money.

So, in this post, I’m going to look at Squarespace costs in depth, taking you through each of the plans, and highlighting all the aspects that make one plan better than another.

By the end of this article, you’ll know which Squarespace pricing plan is best suited to your project — and what alternative products are available if you feel that Squarespace isn’t quite right for your needs.

But first, a key question: what is Squarespace?

What is Squarespace?

Squarespace is a website building tool that is aimed mainly at small business owners and ‘solopreneurs.’

It’s a ‘hosted solution’ — meaning that it runs on its own servers, and you don’t need to install any software on your computer to use it.

Squarespace lets you create your website or online store in a web browser without coding, and edit it easily with a user-friendly content management system (CMS). It also comes with SEO features that help ensure the visibility of your site in search results.

You get started with Squarespace by choosing a template, clicking on the bits of its design that you want to tweak, and then adjusting controllers in the style editor to change them.

For example, you can click on some text and apply a new font; click on a background and change its colour; and so on (the screenshot below gives you an idea of how this works).

Squarespace is a software as a service (‘SaaS’) tool – this means that you don’t own a copy of the software but rather pay a monthly fee to use it.

And speaking of fees…

Squarespace pricing — the available plans

So how much does Squarespace cost?

There are four Squarespace pricing plans available: ‘Personal,’ ‘Business,’ ‘Basic Commerce’ and ‘Advanced Commerce.’ These vary slightly in price depending on your location and/or currency, but the features of each remain consistent.

If you pay on a monthly basis for these plans, the costs are as follows:

Paying on an annual basis brings a sharp reduction in fees:

This means that — depending on your chosen plan, you can save between 24% to 30% by paying annually.

Accordingly, if you have the budget, it makes sense to go for the annual pricing option.

However, if you do, you should take note of Squarespace’s refund policy on it — you can only avail of a full refund when you cancel an annual website subscription within 14 days of commencing it.

You should also note that your subscription will be set to autorenew — this is something you can disable if you prefer, however.

There is also a free Squarespace trial available, which helps you get a sense of which of the above pricing plans will work best for you.

In addition to the basic plans, there are some paid-for extensions / add-ons available, which I’ll come to later in this post — but right now, let’s dig into the features of each of the Squarespace plans.

The Squarespace ‘Personal’ plan

At $16 or $23 per month (depending on whether you go for annual or monthly pricing respectively), the ‘Personal’ plan is Squarespace’s cheapest offering.

It includes the following core features:

* Annual plans only.

The key omissions from this plan

With the ‘Personal’ plan, the omissions are arguably more important than the features — there are three key things that you can’t do with it.

First, you can’t sell anything with the ‘Personal’ plan — so if you need ecommerce features, it’s definitely not for you.

Second, you can’t make use of several key integrations — you won’t be able to hook your Squarespace site up to key services like ChowNow, OpenTable or Zapier, and you won’t be able to add a Facebook pixel (used for tracking the effectiveness of Facebook adverts) to your site.

And finally, you won’t have the option to add CSS or Javascript to your site; this means that if you want to go beyond the standard Squarespace visuals or functionality, you won’t be able to do so (as CSS code and Javascript are necessary, respectively, to create bespoke tweaks to your theme or add your own features).

Is the Squarespace ‘Personal’ plan for me?

With the ‘Personal’ plan, the clue is in the name — it’s generally not suitable for business applications. Rather, it’s geared towards individuals who want a very simple website with a minimum of cost or fuss.

For creating something like a wedding website or a site to promote a birthday party, it’s great. It’s also a reasonably good option for those looking for a simple blogging tool or art portfolio.

If that sounds like you, you can try the Personal plan for free here.

Now there is one business application where the ‘Personal’ plan can be of some use — portfolio sites.

If you’re a photographer or artist needing a platform to showcase your work, the ‘Personal’ plan gives you lots of ways to present your content in attractive ways.

You might also get away with using the ‘Personal’ plan for a simple music website, so long as you don’t want to sell any CDs or downloads using Squarespace’s ecommerce tools (you could still use PayPal buttons or a third-party selling tool to do so, of course).

In truth, to sell products at scale, or monetize your site in other ways, the ‘Personal’ plan isn’t really an option — you’ll need to go for one of the other Squarespace plans, all of which give you access to more business and ecommerce features.

And speaking of which…

The Squarespace ‘Business’ plan

The ‘Business’ plan is the cheapest Squarespace plan that lets you sell online.

In addition to the core features provided with the ‘Personal’ plan, you get the following key additions:

This plan costs $33 or $23 per month, depending on whether you pay on a monthly or annual basis respectively.

Ecommerce omissions in the Business plan

As with the ‘Personal’ plan, the key thing to watch out for is the omissions — in this case, particularly where selling tools are concerned.

With the ‘Business’ plan, whilst you do get quite a lot of ecommerce features included, you will miss out on quite a few important ones.

The key omissions are:

Transaction fees

There is also something else to watch out for on the ‘Business’ plan: transaction fees. On this plan, Squarespace charges you 3% on each purchase from your site.

If you are only selling products every now and again, this isn’t really something to worry about too much.

However, if you end up selling a lot of products with Squarespace, these payment processing fees can end up amounting to a significant (and unnecessary) cost.

Is the ‘Squarespace Business’ plan right for me?

The Squarespace ‘Business’ plan is best suited for website owners who want

In a nutshell, this Squarespace pricing plan is a good option for users who are in the early stages of starting a business. It’s a flexible, feature-rich plan that also facilitates basic online selling.

You can try the ‘Business’ plan for free using this link.

However, by comparison to the Squarespace ‘Commerce’ plans, the ‘Business’ plan’s selling features are rather underpowered, and anyone serious about ecommerce will need to look at one of the higher-tier options.

Let’s take a look at the first of these now.

The Squarespace ‘Basic Commerce’ plan

The Squarespace ‘Basic Commerce’ plan is the first of two dedicated Squarespace ecommerce plans.

It contains all the features provided by the ‘Business’ plan — and removes any transaction fees. And, as the plan’s name suggests, it unlocks several important ecommerce features, namely:

While the above features do beef up Squarespace’s ecommerce functionality significantly, there’s one very important feature which isn’t included in the ‘Basic Commerce’ plan: abandoned cart recovery.

This feature lets you send an automated email to site visitors who go part-way through a transaction only to leave your site at the final stage of the purchase. It can boost sales by up to 15% — so its omission is potentially significant to merchants.

Is the Squarespace ‘Basic Commerce’ plan for me?

The Squarespace ‘Basic Commerce’ plan is a reasonably well-specced commerce plan which gives merchants most of the selling tools they’ll need.

At $36 per month (when paid for on a monthly basis) it’s a bit more expensive than some competing platforms such as GoDaddy or Wix.

(Squarespace competitor Shopify provides a considerably more feature-packed ecommerce plan for just three dollars more at $39 per month — you can learn more about this here).

You can access the free trial for the Squarespace ‘Basic Commerce’ plan here, but for me, the best-value Squarespace plan offering ecommerce functionality is its ‘Advanced Commerce‘ plan.

Let’s find out why.

The Squarespace ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan

At $65 per month ($49 per month if paid annually), the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan unlocks several key features that are very important to professional merchants, namely:

These features, coupled with Squarespace’s generally lovely approach to design and content management, make it by far the most attractive Squarespace plan on offer.

In terms of how this plan stack up against those from competing solutions, whilst it’s not as fully-specced as the higher-tier plans from the likes of BigCommerce and Shopify, it comes in considerably cheaper than both, whilst offering a good range of selling features.

For example, the cheapest BigCommerce plan featuring abandoned cart recovery costs $105 per month; the cheapest Shopify plan featuring third-party real time shipping quotes costs $399.99.

(That said, these plans do offer other features which are not available in Squarespace at all, notably in the area of multi-currency or multi-lingual selling — see our ‘Alternatives’ section below for more details).

Is the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan right for me?

For me, there’s no doubt about it — if you’re serious about ecommerce (or even semi-serious!), the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan is really the only Squarespace plan to go for.

Although the ‘Basic Commerce’ plan provides a decent enough range of commerce features, its lack of abandoned cart recovery tools, advanced discount codes and real time shipping quotes would definitely nudge me towards the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan.

Of all these features, the ‘abandoned cart recovery’ tool is probably the most significant.

It provides merchants with the opportunity to drastically improve conversion rates — and I’ve found that in many contexts, this feature pays for itself and justifies the additional investment in the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan over ‘Basic Commerce.’

You can test the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan for free here.

The ‘Squarespace Enterprise’ plan

In addition to the standard Squarespace plans, there is another plan to consider: Squarespace Enterprise.

This plan basically provides you with more hand-holding — you’ll get a dedicated account manager, SEO consultations and design advice.

Pricing for this plan is negotiable — you’ll have to contact Squarespace to discuss your needs and they’ll provide a quotation.

Whether Squarespace truly amounts to a solution for enterprises is debatable — in my experience the main thing that enterprises need is very bespoke functionality and advanced SEO optimizations; two things which I’m not sure Squarespace is yet equipped to provide.

For me, Squarespace shines more as a tool for small businesses and solopreneurs who need an elegant, simple tool for building a website — but if you are interested in more support, or using Squarespace in more advanced ways, you can learn more about ‘Squarespace Enterprise’ here.

Squarespace add-ons / integrations

If the core features included in your chosen Squarespace plan aren’t quite enough, you can add to them in a few different ways.

Squarespace extensions and plugins

Squarespace extensions are the equivalent of WordPress plugins or Shopify apps — they are typically developed by third parties and give you additional functionality for a monthly fee.

At the moment, the number of official extensions available is very small — there are just 41 available.

Many of them focussing on inventory management and accounting, but recently a few dropshipping apps have been added to the selection too.

Another way to beef up your Squarespace site’s functionality is to make use of third-party ‘code snippets’. These are increasingly referred to as ‘Squarespace plugins‘ and let you do everything from format galleries in particular ways to adding ecommerce features.

Squarespace plugins are not ‘official’ add-ons — they can be developed by a wide range of third-parties — so it’s important to do some due diligence before adding them to your site.

But they can be extremely good for adding interesting features to Squarespace sites.

Squarespace Email Campaigns

Squarespace isn’t just a website builder — these days, it’s technically an email marketing tool too. For an extra monthly fee, you can host a mailing list on Squarespace and send e-newsletters to it.

The number of email addresses you can host on your list is uncapped, but the following monthly fees apply to the number of emails you can send to it:

As with the standard Squarespace fees, you can reduce your costs significantly by paying for Squarespace Email Campaigns on an annual basis (if you do so, the above fees become $5, $10, $24 and $48 per month respectively).

Squarespace member areas

A useful ‘add-on’ to consider for content creators is the Squarespace member areas tool.

This lets you charge users for access to a private area of your website, allowing you to sell courses, exclusive content and more to your audience.

The fees for this are as follows:

Again, sizeable discounts are available if you pay upfront for a year for this service (when you pay annually, the costs for the above plans work out at $9, $29 and $89per month).

A key difference to be aware of regarding the members area pricing is the amount of video storage you get with each plan. The quota for the Starter and Core plans are 10 hours and 50 hours respectively, while the Pro plan gives you an unlimited amount of video storage.

As a lot of members’ area users will be subscribing to the feature to sell video-heavy online courses, it’s important to pay attention to these limits.

(For the record, you get 30 minutes of video storage on all the standard Squarespace plans).

Check out the video below for more information about the members’ area feature, or read more about it here.

Squarespace scheduling

Another useful add-on to consider is the Squarespace Scheduling feature.

With this, clients can view your availability and book their own appointments or classes. They can pay online for these, and reschedule them.

This extra functionality involves an additional fee however, with the Squarespace Scheduling pricing plans being as follows:

As with the other Squarespace pricing options, these fees are reduced if you pay upfront for a year (to $16, $27 and $49 per month respectively).

In terms of the key differences between these plans, all of them let you, your team and your clients access an appointment calendar; the ‘Growing’ plan adds SMS reminders, gift cards and subscriptions; and the ‘Powerhouse’ plan allows you to work across multiple time zones and access the Scheduling API.

(There are a few other differences which you can check out here).

Tock

Tock is an event management and ticketing system that lets website owners take reservations — making it a particularly good fit for restaurant owners, many of whom use Squarespace.

Recently acquired by Squarespace for $400m, it can now be closely integrated with the platform.

If you want to use Tock to take bookings for restaurants, monthly fees apply.

There are 4 annual Tock plans available. These are:

If you take out a two-year or three-year Tock plan, you can avail of 8% – 25% discounts on these pricing options, depending on your chosen plan.

If you want to use Tock to handle takeout and delivery services, it’s a case of paying a 3% transaction fee per order.

To use it as a ticketing system, depending on your requirements and the complexity of your bookings, you’ll need to pay a transaction fee of 3% plus $0.99 per ticket.

(Wine lovers will be interested to know that Tock has just launched an ecommerce wine marketplace that lets vineyards sell their wines directly to consumers).

You can learn more about Tock here.

The sweet spots? The ‘Business’ and ‘Advanced Commerce’ plans

So, after all that, what’s the best Squarespace plan to choose?

Well, when advising clients on what the best Squarespace plan for them is, I always ask them the following question: what’s your site for, content or ecommerce?

Content sites typically include:

And an ecommerce site would be:

If creating a content site is your main aim, my advice would usually be to go for the ‘Business’ plan — the ‘Personal’ plan, with its restrictions on integrations, custom coding and popups, really is suitable for the most basic projects only.

The ‘Business plan’ has the added advantage of facilitating basic online selling too — meaning that if you do want to dip your toes into e-commerce, you are good to go with that on this plan.

If you want to use Squarespace for professional ecommerce purposes, then I would usually ignore all the other plans and head straight for the ‘Advanced Commerce’ plan.

The bundled abandoned cart recovery tool will usually make up for the cost difference between this and the cheaper plans, and the other ecommerce features it provides are extremely welcome too.

Buying domains from Squarespace

By default, when you create a website with Squarespace, you get a ‘Squarespace domain’ — yoursitename.squarespace.com.

Although technically your site can live happily at this web address, and will function perfectly well there, it’s generally better to use a custom domain name (‘yoursitename.com’). Custom domain names generate more trust in a brand and can perform better in search results too.

If you pay for your Squarespace pricing plan via an annual subscription, you’ll get a free domain name from Squarespace for your first year of service. Alternatively, you can buy a custom domain name from Squarespace (prices range from $12 — $70).

For security reasons however, some people prefer to use a separate domain registrar – it’s generally better practice to keep your domain and your hosting / CMS with different providers (so that if you lose access to one account you don’t lose access to everything).

Free trials and discounts

If you’re interested in using Squarespace, a 14-day trial is available, and the company is currently offering 10% off its plans. This can amount to quite a saving, especially if you opt for one of its ‘commerce’ plans.

This discount is available for a limited time only — to get it,

Alternatives to Squarespace

No discussion on Squarespace pricing would be complete without a look at some of the other website builders available!

If your plan is to use a ‘hosted’ website builder to create a content-based site (portfolio, brochure site, music site etc.), it’s hard to argue with Squarespace. Its templates are elegant; the platform is feature rich; and it’s really easy to use.

But if you do feel like looking elsewhere, you could consider Wix, Jimdo or WordPress.com (the hosted version of WordPress).

You can learn more in our Wix vs Squarespace and Wix vs Shopify videos below.

Another option is to go down the ‘self-hosted’ WordPress route — our Squarespace vs WordPress comparison goes through the pros and cons of using this rather than Squarespace.

If the main goal of your project is to build an ecommerce site, then Shopify is probably the most obvious alternative.

Whilst Shopify’s template selection isn’t quite as extensive as Squarespace’s, and its non-commerce features (blogging, galleries etc.) are less impressive, it boasts an extremely comprehensive set of online selling tools that eclipse many of Squarespace’s.

In particular, Shopify is great for multilingual selling and selling in multiple currencies (Squarespace currently isn’t a particularly good fit for multilingual selling and doesn’t facilitate selling in multiple currencies at all).

You can try Shopify for free here.

BigCommerce is also a very good option for building an ecommerce site with — for more information about this tool, do take a look at our review of the platform, check out our BigCommerce vs Squarespace shootout or watch our BigCommerce vs Shopify video below.