The line items nobody puts on the pricing page

The bill that surprises people is never the first one. The first bill matches the pricing page, because the pricing page is where you were looking when you paid it. The one that surprises people is the second one — the renewal, eleven or twelve months later, for a number nobody showed them the first time round. That gap between the advertised price and the renewal price is not an accident of a few unlucky builders. It's a structural feature of the category, and it shows up in the same six places on almost every platform, which means it can be checked before you buy rather than discovered afterwards.

If what you're building is one page for one person — a portfolio, a CV as a URL, a freelancer's landing page — reach is the strongest answer available, and most of the checklist below simply doesn't apply to it. It generates that page from a CV in about twenty seconds and puts it live on a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes, and its pricing has exactly one paid tier: Premium, at $4.99 a month or $49 a year, for a custom domain. There's no transaction fee, no storage tier to outgrow, no email add-on to discover later, because there's no e-commerce, no CMS and no inbox to sell you in the first place. The honest cost that does exist: if you buy a domain through reach, the price is the registrar's rate plus a flat $3 margin, and you cannot bring a domain you already own — the only path to a custom address is buying one through reach itself. That's a real constraint, not a hidden one, and it's worth knowing before the six line items below, because reach genuinely doesn't have most of them.

For everyone building something reach can't — a multi-page site, a store, a blog with a mailing list — the rest of this piece is the checklist.

Domain renewal at list price

The domain that came "free" with your plan was free for one year. Wix ties that free domain specifically to the annual-paid-upfront tier — pay monthly and the voucher doesn't apply at all. Squarespace's Basic plan includes a free domain for the first year too, on the $19-a-month, billed-annually tier. After that first year, the domain renews at the registrar's standard rate, and on the budget end of self-hosted WordPress that jump is not subtle. IONOS's Grow plan advertises $1 a month for the first year and renews at $12 — twelve times the intro rate. Hostinger's Premium plan, paid 48 months up front, runs $2.99 a month and renews at $10.99. SiteGround's StartUp, paid for a year up front, goes from $2.99 to $17.99. Only Kinsta, among the hosts worth naming here, prices the same from day one with no introductory mechanic to renew out of.

None of this is disclosed dishonestly — it's on the pricing page, in the renewal-terms footnote, in the language everyone skips. The check is one search: does the plan's price page contain the word "renew," and if so, what's the number next to it. What actually happens if you miss that renewal window and the domain lapses is its own subject — see what happens when a domain expires.

Email that almost nobody includes permanently

A working inbox at your own domain is the thing every small business assumes comes with a website and, on most builders, doesn't. It's a separate purchase, usually through a Workspace-style add-on, and it's easy to miss because the builder's own pricing page is about the site, not the mailbox. We cover the specific providers and their per-mailbox pricing in email on your own domain; the point that belongs here is narrower — budget for it as a recurring line separate from hosting, because on almost every platform in this category, that's exactly what it is.

Transaction fees stacked on top of payment processing

This one is rarer among the builders aimed at personal and small-business sites, but where it exists it's easy to miss because it's a percentage rather than a flat number. Typedream charges 5% on sales at its free tier, dropping to 2% once you're on the paid Launch plan — on top of whatever the payment processor itself takes. If a builder's free or entry tier lets you sell anything at all, that's the question to ask before the first sale, not after: is there a platform cut in addition to the processor's, and does it change at the next tier up.

Premium templates and stock imagery you didn't budget for

The template gallery on most builders looks free because the gallery itself is free — what isn't always free is everything inside it. Stock photography, premium font packs and certain layout categories are gated behind a paid tier on several platforms, which means the design you picked during the free trial can turn out to require an upgrade to actually use. It's also worth knowing that a design decision made early can be a one-way door: Wix's own support documentation states plainly that "it's not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created." Changing your mind after the fact means rebuilding, not reselecting — which turns a $0 design choice into a multi-hour one if you get it wrong.

Storage, bandwidth and video that meters past a point

Every plan lists a number for storage or bandwidth, and the number is generous right up until a specific kind of content — usually video — burns through it faster than photos or text ever would. Squarespace's Basic tier caps video storage at 30 minutes regardless of how much general storage is otherwise available. Framer's Basic plan includes 50 GB of bandwidth a month, which is plenty for a portfolio and not much for a page that embeds video people actually watch. Ghost caps individual file uploads at 5 MB on its entry tier — enough for text and small images, not for video at all. And Bubble prices differently again: it doesn't throttle you when you go over, it bills you, on a workload-unit system where page views, actions and searches all draw from one metered pool that scales automatically and charges as it scales. The common thread is that overage is rarely a hard wall — it's a slower page, a blocked upload or a bigger invoice, and none of those show up until the content that triggers them is already live.

What a custom domain actually costs across the field

The spread here is wide enough that it's worth putting side by side, priced at the cheapest tier that includes a custom domain on each platform, billed as each vendor actually bills it.

Builder	Cheapest tier with a custom domain	Price	Billing
reach	Premium	$4.99	per month, or $49/year
Carrd	Pro Standard	$19	per year, annual only
Framer	Basic	$10	per month, billed annually
Squarespace	Basic	$19	per month, billed annually ($25 monthly)
Webflow	Basic	$15	per month, billed annually ($25 monthly)
Wix	Light	$17	per month, billed annually

Prices checked August 2026. Carrd is the cheapest route to a domain of your own if you're willing to start from an empty template and write every word yourself. reach costs more per year than Carrd but replaces that starting point with a finished draft built from a CV — a different trade, not a strictly better one, and which side of it you want depends on whether the obstacle you're solving for is money or momentum.

The ten-minute check before you subscribe

Before paying for any plan, four searches on the vendor's own pricing page catch most of what's above. Search the page for "renew" and read what the number becomes after the first term. Search for "email" and confirm whether a mailbox is included or a separate line item. Search for "overage" or "per" near storage and bandwidth figures, since that's where metering language hides. And check whether the template or design you actually want is available at the tier you're about to pay for, not the one shown in the gallery during the free trial. None of these take more than a minute each, and together they turn the second-year bill from a surprise into a number you already knew was coming — which is the entire difference between a checklist and a complaint written after the fact. For the fuller picture of what each major builder costs across a full plan structure rather than one line item at a time, the companion piece on what website builders actually cost walks through six platforms tier by tier.