The hidden cost of Wix, Squarespace and Shopify

The pitch for Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy and every other website builder is the same: "$17 a month, no upfront cost, launch this weekend." It's a real deal — for month one. Here's what the second, third, and fifth year actually look like.

Start with the base subscription. Wix Business is $17/month. Squarespace Business is $23. Shopify Basic is $39. Add domain ($15/year), a couple of apps for booking or email or SEO ($10–30/month each), and you're at $50–90/month before you've done anything ambitious. Multiply by 60 months. You've spent $3,000–5,400 for a template that isn't yours.

But the direct cash is not the real cost. The real cost is opportunity cost. Template sites are slow — usually 40–60 Lighthouse performance, sometimes worse on mobile. That's every visitor that hit the site, saw it lag, and left. Google downranks slow sites. If you're in a competitive local SEO market — restaurants, dentists, contractors — the difference between a fast custom site and a slow template site is often the difference between page one and page three of Google. Page three is invisible.

Template sites also fight you when you want anything specific. Wix's checkout can't do X. Shopify's shipping engine won't respect Y. Squarespace's blog is a certain shape and no other. You end up asking for the platform's feature rather than asking for what your business actually needs. Business decisions get shaped by tool limits.

And when you outgrow the platform — every business we've watched does, sooner or later — the migration is a rebuild. The content might export. The design won't. The URLs won't map cleanly. The SEO history you built resets to zero. You pay for the site twice.

A custom build at $500–1,500 costs more in month one. It costs less in month six and dramatically less in year three. And you own it. That's the trade the builders never quite name.