Squarespace Pricing in 2023 Explained: Which Plan Is Best for Your Business?
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Recognized for its flexibility and ease of use, the Squarespace platform is a great choice for many website developers.
If you’re just starting out, or you’re ready to move to the next level, you might be wondering which Squarespace pricing plan is best for your needs. Whether you’re a creative professional who designs websites for a living, or you’re a small-to-medium business owner deciding which plan to purchase for your online presence, this is an important consideration. Take some time to explore the different plans.
This article covers, in detail, the plans that Squarespace currently offers. What you select depends on many factors, including which features you want, what functionality you need, and what your budget is.
Review our comprehensive guide before choosing the Squarespace pricing plan that’s right for you. Then, try that plan for a while. If you find that it’s not working for you, review the plans again and select one that suits you better. Don’t feel stuck with a plan that doesn’t meet your needs, especially when there are several great options to choose from.
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Squarespace Pricing: Need-to-Knows
The first thing you need to know is that Squarespace offers a free 14-day trial you can start with if you’re new to the platform.
Two weeks is a good length of time to dive in and get familiar with the platform. The free trial period gives you a chance to try things out, get a feel for the software, and gain an understanding of both the strengths and limitations you’ll encounter.
Another need-to-know is that you can pay per month or per year.
Squarespace pricing plans can be paid for monthly or annually, with a 24% to 30% savings when you purchase a yearly plan.
If savings are particularly important to you and your business at this stage, an annual plan may be a better value.
If flexibility is more important to you right now, a monthly plan may be a better option. A monthly commitment makes it easier to switch to another plan if you decide the first one you chose isn’t working for you.
What’s more, you need to know that the plans covered here are ideal for individual developers, small development firms, and small-to-medium sized businesses. Solopreneurs, as well as marketing and design firms, are great fits for these plans. If you are new to freelancing as a Squarespace designer, Launch Happy offers a ton of videos to help you get started.
If you run a large enterprise, Squarespace has got your back. Whether you own or manage a large company, or you’re a web designer within a big-business organization, check out Squarespace Enterprise and contact the sales team for a customized quote. Squarespace Enterprise is an excellent option for anyone who needs to manage hundreds of websites and wants a reliable way to scale.
For everyone else, the plans listed here should have what you need to keep going and growing for a long time—until your business becomes the next Nike, Indeed, Starbucks, or Apple and you need to scale up! When you reach that point, you can switch to Squarespace Enterprise.
Squarespace Pricing Breakdown
Here are the Squarespace pricing plans that are available to you at present, along with their costs and annual contract discounts. Each plan lets you manage one website for your business or personal use:
Personal
$23/month when paying monthly
$16/month, a 30% savings, when paying annually
Business
$33/month when paying monthly
$23/month, a 30% savings, when paying annually
Basic Commerce
$36/month when paying monthly
$27/month, a 25% savings, when paying annually
Advanced Commerce
$65/month when paying monthly
$49/month, a 24% savings, when paying annually
Whatever line of business you’re in—whether you’re an artist or attorney, an ecommerce online sports memorabilia vendor or auto parts distributor, one of these plans should fit your needs.
If you’re a web developer, think about who you’re designing for. The types of clients you serve will affect which plan you recommend for each client. For your own website, a business plan is probably perfect for showcasing the web development services you offer. As your business offerings expand and you create products to sell, you may want to switch to a commerce plan.
Keep in mind that prices can change at any time, so double-check with Squarespace directly to see if any of these prices have changed since we’ve published this piece.
Personal vs. Business Plan
Both the personal and business plans are ideal for building websites. Some of the things you’ll find in common with both plans are:
Availability of templates you can use to simplify your design process
Ease of adding pages and updating navigation menus
A framework for creating galleries, something that photographers, digital artists, travel agents, property managers, and countless other professionals need
Features in place to generate mobile-optimized websites
Here’s a look at what each of these two plans offers and what differentiates them.
Personal ($16/month with an annual contract)
Smaller, simpler websites with one to two regular contributors typically don’t require anything beyond the personal plan, which is the lowest-cost offering among the Squarespace pricing plans. A business that isn’t an ecommerce store, is run by an individual or a small team, and focuses on services, consultations, or commissioned work is a good candidate for the personal plan.
With the personal plan, you’ll get:
A site that’s optimized for mobile and has up to 1,000 pages
A wide range of templates to choose from
Free custom domain (only with the annual contract option)
Customer support you can access any time
SEO features to help your audiences find you
Unlimited bandwidth
Intuitive drag-and-drop editor
Basic website metrics
SSL security
Video storage (up to 30 minutes)
Up to 2 contributors to the site
Squarespace extensions
Video maker
Audience management
Custom merch
A Squarespace personal plan can be used for both business and non-business purposes. College students, family reunion sites, and local charity events are just a few of the many possible groups that might benefit from creating and sharing a personal website that’s unrelated to a specific business.
Business ($23/month with an annual contract)
A business plan lets you invite unlimited contributors to the site—which is good for a business where multiple people with different roles need to update the website. Someone might add weekly or monthly blogs. Someone else might need to go through and optimize the site. Another person may need to swap out images periodically. A Squarespace business plan lets you allow all these different individuals in to complete what they need to do, including adding custom code or integrating third-party services.
With a business plan, you have access to premium features. You might select this plan because you want a more robust online presence for your business with the ability to set up a small online shop. You’re allowed to sell unlimited items—but you don’t have all of the more advanced features that the commerce plans have. For many businesses, this is enough.
Here’s what you can expect to get when you purchase a Squarespace business plan for your site:
Everything that comes with the personal plan, plus the following
Unlimited number of contributors you can invite to work on your site (such as coders, writers, editors, marketers, admins, graphic designers, and more)
Advanced website analytics
Fully integrated ecommerce with store design and checkout flow (a 3% transaction fee is charged)
Checkout with payment options directly on your domain
A free year of the Google Workspace Starter plan with a custom email address (eligibility requirements apply)
Full customization with JavaScript and CSS
Promotional banners and pop-ups for more opportunities to speak to your audiences
The ability to sell unlimited products
If you run a business and you need a professional online presence that helps you look like a leader or an authority in your field, a business plan is an excellent option. If you need more than two people to maintain or add to your site, opt for a business plan, not a personal one.
You don’t have to sell products or services directly from your site if you don’t want to, but the business plan provides you with this option—which you can tap into down the road when you’re ready.
If you need a site that comes with features designed to facilitate a higher volume of sales directly through your website, a commerce plan is the way to go. We’ll go over these plans next.
Basic Commerce vs. Advanced Commerce Plan
If you’re using your business website as an online store and you start to make a lot of sales, the 3% transaction fees charged by the business plan can add up fast. At that point, a more cost-advantageous option is one of the Squarespace commerce plans.
Two are available, a basic and an advanced plan. Which you choose depends in large part on the volume of sales your business makes each month.
While some newer ecommerce businesses may be better off starting with the basic commerce plan, others that anticipate healthy sales growth may choose the advanced commerce plan from the start for access to helpful, more advanced features.
In our in-depth article comparing Squarespace pricing plans for ecommerce stores, we cover the pros and cons of the basic versus advanced plans in detail (check it out, it’s worth a read). Some key points you’ll glean from that article are:
The advanced plan offers many features not available with the basic plan, such as abandoned cart recovery, subscription sales, and greater flexibility in offering discounts.
Do you need, or do you anticipate needing, any of the ecommerce features that are included only in the advanced plan?
If you get an annual contract, an advanced commerce plan will cost you $22 a month more than a basic commerce plan. If you get a month-to-month contract, the advanced plan will cost $29 a month more than the basic plan. Can your business handle this additional cost with minimal impact?
If you’re not sure which plan to choose, you can always start with the basic commerce plan and upgrade later.
Ultimately, you have to determine what’s best for your business.
Do you have the funds to build an ecommerce site with the advanced features you think you’ll eventually need? Are you expecting to grow sales quickly? Does the advanced plan enable you to offer your customers a better shopping experience? Does the basic plan work best now and moving forward with the inventory size you offer?
These questions and more need to be weighed carefully before you choose your best-fit Squarespace pricing plan.
Basic Commerce ($27/month with an annual contract) When comparing Squarespace pricing plans for ecommerce, someone who is just starting out in the ecommerce space may decide to save money and keep things simple by going with the basic plan.
A basic plan supports smaller ecommerce shop owners who aren’t necessarily looking for advanced integrations for marketing purposes. If your selection of products is smaller, more niche, or eclectic, or you’re not interested in doing a deep-dive into more advanced marketing approaches, basic commerce might be right for you.
With a basic commerce plan, you can expect to get the following:
Everything that comes with the personal and business plans, plus the following
Fully integrated ecommerce with 0% transaction fee
More powerful merchandising features
Additional commerce analytics
Rugged point of sale (POS) system for processing sales transactions
A way to collect and display customers’ product reviews
Local and regional shipping options
The ability for visitors to create their own customer accounts
Limited availability labels that show customers which items are low in stock
The ability to sell on Facebook and Instagram
The basic commerce plan is a sturdy option that lets you set up and run an ecommerce store with just about everything that a customer would expect to encounter when doing online shopping.
Advanced Commerce ($49/month with an annual contract)
For anyone who’s seeing high volumes of sales at their ecommerce store, the advanced commerce offering is the best option among all the Squarespace pricing plans.
Advanced commerce comes with insightful features none of the other plans have. Even if you are interested in using one or two of these extra features—for example, offering your visitors a subscription, or giving them better shipping options—you may find it worthwhile to purchase the advanced plan.
The advanced commerce Squarespace pricing plan includes:
Everything that comes with the personal and business and basic commerce plans, plus the following
Advanced shipping options that show real-time rates
Advanced discounting features that give you more flexibility with offering promos
The ability to sell subscriptions to your customers
Abandoned cart recovery to remind customers who haven’t completed their purchase
Commerce APIs for your own store customizations
If you’re running a large ecommerce store and processing many orders each month, select advanced commerce. If you’re currently on the business or the basic commerce plan, don’t be afraid to upgrade to this option once you see sales start to really take off.
Even if you’ve signed an annual contract, you can upgrade to another plan. Squarespace allows you to change your website billing plan when you’re ready.
Squarespace Hidden Additional Costs
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With these Squarespace pricing plans, are there additional hidden costs?
Yes, there are a few costs that some consider standard in the industry but that can get missed by newcomers or anyone unfamiliar with what goes into building and running a site.
Here’s a list of additional costs to be aware of.
1. Squarespace Transaction Fees
Some people with an online store save money by paying for the lower-cost business plan instead of the higher-cost basic commerce plan. Others end up paying more unintentionally with the business plan.
Why? Because of Squarespace’s transaction fees.
Ecommerce on the business plan includes an additional 3% transaction fee.
The business plan comes with integrated ecommerce capability that lets you sell items. If you’re an up-and-coming music band, for example, you can have a developer create your band’s website on the business plan, building in a small store that lets visitors buy music releases and T-shirts from you.
If your sales are modest, the 3% transaction fee will probably be offset by the monthly savings you’re getting by being on the cheaper plan.
But when your sales start to increase, you might be better off switching to the basic ecommerce plan, which comes with a 0% transaction fee.
Both commerce plans have no transaction fees.
2. Domain Names
When you purchase an annual contract, regardless of which plan you select, a free custom domain is included for the first year.
However, when you select the pay monthly option, the custom domain is not included, which means this is an extra fee you’ll need to pay.
After the first year, standard domain name fees will apply, which typically range between $20 and $70 a year.
If you don’t yet have a domain name, the benefits of getting a domain with Squarespace include:
Low initial cost (free with a one-year contract on one of the Squarespace pricing plans)
SSL certificates are included
WHOIS privacy is included
Easy DNS management is provided
If you already have a domain name, you can transfer your domain to Squarespace.
Difference between website hosting and domain hosting
Some people get confused between website hosting and domain hosting. There is a difference between these two separate entities, along with different pricing for each.
Website hosting is the online service that enables your site to be published and visible on the Internet. When you have this service, people can access your website’s content.
Domain hosting is a service that manages your domain name—the name of your website, such as TablesAreUs.com. It’s the name that people use to search for your business and find you.
Anticipate separate fees for these two very different, albeit connected and necessary, website-related functions, regardless of which platform you use.
3. Email Marketing
For many businesses, email marketing is a powerful way to connect with customers and generate more sales.
Email campaigning is separate from website building, and it comes with its own set of pricing depending on how many emails you send out per month, how many campaigns you launch each month, whether you pay monthly or annually, and other considerations.
Take a look at Squarespace’s email marketing page to see what email campaign plans are available and how much they cost.
4. Payment processing fees
Another type of fee that’s not included in the Squarespace pricing plans the platform makes available for building websites is payment processing.
If you use a third-party entity for payment processing, such as Stripe or PayPal, expect to pay the rates that these services charge. Check to see what these rates are in your country.
What Is the Difference Between the Personal and Business Plans?
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A personal plan is ideal for individuals who want an online presence but aren’t using their website as a store. It’s suited for a smaller-scale operation with a website that can be run by one or two people—a site admin and a blogger, for example, or an admin and a digital artist.
A personal plan might be the right fit for solopreneurs advertising their services. It can also be the right solution for people sharing their side projects with online audiences, creatives building a portfolio, or anyone who wants to build a personal website to showcase a special interest or event, for example.
A business plan is best suited for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small businesses, and medium-sized businesses that want a professional online presence and need to give multiple people with different roles access to the site. If you have different individuals in charge of updating pages, optimizing for SEO, writing blogs, adding images, writing code, and doing routine admin site maintenance, you’ll need a business plan, not a personal plan.
If you’re a Squarespace designer looking for a solid, methodical approach to getting started quickly in the right direction, Launch Happy offers a designer starter kit that provides the tools you need and walks you through the steps to becoming a world-class designer. Check it out today.
1. Ecommerce
A major difference between a personal and business plan is ecommerce availability.
You can’t do ecommerce with a personal plan, but you can with a business plan.
If you want to sell products or services directly from your website, and you don’t need more advanced ecommerce capabilities, a business plan will allow you to set up your online store and process online sales.
2. Third-Party Integrations
Your business website may need to incorporate third-party integrations for many possible reasons, including:
Making reservations
Accepting payments
Adding chat applications
Including map features
Integrating with other popular apps
If this is important to you and necessary for your business, go with the business plan, not the personal one. The business plan includes built-in integrations with third-party apps and services.
3. Advanced Metrics
While the personal plan provides you with basic website metrics, the business plan gives you more advanced website analytics.
With advanced metrics, you can better understand consumer behavior and make changes to your site to attract more members of your target audience while improving their user experience.
4. Marketing Tools
The personal plan doesn’t include ecommerce, so you can’t set up a store, and it also doesn’t include much in the way of marketing tools, beyond a few things like SEO features.
The business plan includes fully integrated ecommerce, including more marketing tools to help bring interested, engaged visitors to your site. It gives you the ability to add pop-ups and banners to boost your marketing efforts.
The business plan also comes with Mailchimp integration to help you connect with customers through newsletters and email campaigns; the personal plan does not include Mailchimp integration.
Additional Squarespace Costs
Google Workspace
You can use Google Workspace with Squarespace to set up custom emails. The integration enables you to create email addresses that match your custom domain.
Eligible Squarespace pricing plans give you a free year of Google Workspace Starter plan use.
Thereafter, additional costs will apply. You can learn more about Google Workspace integration, pricing, and features by reviewing Squarespace’s help page on this topic.
Member Areas
If you want to create member areas on your site but your plan doesn’t support this, you can still add these areas by paying a transaction fee.
To learn more about managing and paying for member area subscriptions, read the detailed Squarespace page about member areas pricing.
Video Storage
Some video storage is provided with Squarespace pricing plans.
You can purchase more. Depending on which plan you have, you can get between 5 and 50 hours of additional video storage.
Email Marketing
Squarespace enables you to manage your subscription to email campaigns based on your monthly email volume.
While some email campaign features are free, others are available for an additional cost. Refer to the platform’s email campaigns plans and pricing page for details.
Which Squarespace Plan Should You Choose for Ecommerce?
If your business is built around ecommerce, you’ll want to focus your attention on the two commerce plans. Squarespace pricing plans include two ecommerce options—one basic, one advanced—and some ecommerce business owners have a hard time deciding between the two.
Here are the main points to keep in mind to help you choose between the ecommerce options.
Basic Commerce
Supports smaller businesses and ecommerce stores
Lets you provide customer accounts
Fully integrated ecommerce with 0% transaction fee
Supports customer product reviews
Lets you sell on Facebook and Instagram
Advanced Commerce
Includes everything found in the basic commerce plan
Adds advanced shipping options
Lets you sell subscriptions
Gives you advanced discounting options
Includes abandoned cart recovery
Can I Use Squarespace for Free?
You can use Squarespace for free during the 14-day trial period the website building company offers, and I recommend you do so if you haven’t yet.
During this time, you’ll learn if this platform is useful to you. Some developers like Squarespace so much they decide to work with it exclusively. Others add it to their repertoire, using it with some clients and using other platforms, like WiX, Webflow, or WordPress, with other clients.
One of the best things you can do as a growing website developer is to learn as much as possible. Eventually you’ll settle into a method that works best for you. Try Squarespace and other web development platforms to see how each one works, learn the pros and cons of each, and determine which you like best.
Whether you’re a developer, small business owner, ecommerce store builder, solopreneur, service provider, or a professional who needs a website, when you’re ready to start your Squarespace site, follow our link and use the Squarespace coupon code ISKANDER to save 20% on the plan of your choice.
Additional Squarespace Pricing FAQs
Here are several more points to keep in mind when deciding between Squarespace pricing plans.
You can start, stop, or switch your service as your needs shift.
All Squarespace plans come with fully managed cloud hosting.
You don’t need to download Squarespace because it exists on the cloud.
Your Squarespace ecommerce store can accept different payment methods, including Stripe, Apple Pay, PayPal, and credit card.
To see if you qualify for a student discount, review Squarespace’s education program.
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