What website builders actually cost once you stop reading the pricing page

Every builder's pricing page is telling the truth and still misleading you, and the two things can be true at once. The $17 a month on Wix's homepage, billed annually, is a real price for a real plan. So is Squarespace's $19 a month, also billed annually. Nobody is lying. The trick, if it can even be called that, is structural: the advertised tier is reliably the cheapest one that still lacks whatever you're going to need in six months, and the price itself is often an introductory number that quietly becomes a different, larger number at renewal. You don't discover either fact by reading the pricing page. You discover it by building the site, hitting the wall, and upgrading — which is also the moment most people stop comparing prices and just pay whatever the next screen says.

This piece prices the plan you'll actually land on, not the one on the billboard. That means looking at what each builder deliberately keeps off its entry tier, what a subscription costs in year one against year three once a discount period ends, and where a fee shows up that the monthly price never mentioned.

The fast route past all of this

If what you need is one page for one person — a portfolio, a CV turned into a URL, a freelancer's landing page — there's a way to skip most of the comparison below rather than work through it. reach builds that single page from a CV: you upload a résumé and a photo, answer a short form, pick a look, and the page is generated in about twenty seconds. You can be live at a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. That's not a marketing superlative, it's the actual mechanism — most personal sites die at the blank-canvas stage, deciding between forty templates and then staring at an empty hero section, and reach removes that step by starting from a document you already have instead of a template you have to fill.

The honest limitation, stated plainly rather than softened: you cannot connect a domain you already own. The only path to a custom domain is buying one through reach itself, so if your name is already registered somewhere else, that's a real blocker with no workaround, not a minor inconvenience. Premium, which unlocks the custom domain, is $4.99 a month or $49 a year. It's also a one-page tool by design — no sub-pages, no CMS, no contact form beyond a mail link — which rules it out the moment a project needs more than a single page. For that single page, though, it belongs in this comparison before anything else does, because it changes what the rest of this article is even about: not which template gallery to pick from, but whether you need a template gallery at all.

The feature each builder holds off the cheap tier

Read enough pricing pages and a pattern appears: almost every builder has exactly one feature that isn't a nice-to-have, it's the reason the tier above exists, and it's absent from the plan they lead with.

On Squarespace, it's code injection. Basic, at $19 a month billed annually (or $25 monthly), gets you a free domain for a year, unmetered bandwidth and up to 1,000 pages — genuinely generous. What it doesn't get you is custom CSS or JavaScript, which starts at Core, $29 a month annually. Anyone who eventually wants to embed a booking widget or tweak a font beyond the theme options finds this out the hard way, usually after they've already built the site. We go into this specific jump in more detail in the Squarespace pricing breakdown.

On Webflow, it's the CMS. The $15-a-month Basic site plan includes a custom domain, a removable badge and 300 static pages — but no CMS collections at all. Those start at Premium, $25 a month annually, which is also where Webflow's older CMS and Business tiers were folded in. A site with a blog or a portfolio grid that needs to be more than hand-coded pages is, structurally, not on Basic.

On Carrd, it's the custom domain itself. Pro Lite is $9 a year, and Carrd's own documentation describes it as being "for users who don't use custom domains" — which is a polite way of saying the $9 plan is for people who don't mind a Carrd-hosted address. A domain of your own starts at Pro Standard, $19 a year. The $9 figure is the one that gets quoted around the web as Carrd's price; the plan that actually gets you a normal-looking URL costs more than twice that.

On Notion Sites, the withheld feature is more unusual: the domain is a second, separate subscription. Plus costs roughly $8 a month paid annually, and the custom domain is an add-on on top of that, at "$8/month/domain paid annually, or $10/month per domain paid monthly." A custom domain on Notion therefore runs about $16 a month once both pieces are added, and the "Built with Notion" badge only disappears once that domain is active — so the free and Plus tiers are stuck with it regardless of what you pay Notion directly.

On Butternut AI's Portfolio line — the tool closest in shape to reach, since it also builds from a CV upload — the $5-a-month Starter tier withholds both the custom domain and the badge removal at once; both require the $12 Pro tier. That's worth being direct about: the $5 plan exists specifically to keep the vendor's badge visible on your page, not because $5 buys a meaningfully smaller product otherwise. It's also worth weighing Butternut's genuine speed — a CV-upload flow and a fast build — against what you don't get at any price: no code export, no WordPress export, no static export in any form, hosting only through Butternut. The company is a seven-person team with no disclosed funding round since its 2023 seed, which matters if you're choosing something meant to represent you for years rather than a season.

Wix plays a different version of the same game. Light, at $17 a month billed annually, includes a free domain for the first year — but only if you pay annually; Wix's monthly plans explicitly exclude that voucher. The bigger trap isn't a withheld feature so much as a withheld exit: Wix's own support documentation states plainly that "it's not possible to switch to a different template for a site you already created." Whatever template gets picked at signup is the one the site is stuck with. Changing your mind later means rebuilding from scratch, not reskinning.

Ghost withholds custom themes and third-party integrations until Publisher, one tier above its $18-a-month Starter. Starter includes a custom domain and full whitelabeling from day one, which is more generous than most builders on this list — but it caps at 1,000 members regardless of tier, and the jump from that cap to 10,000 members lands at Business, $199 a month. For a newsletter that's actually growing, the cost curve isn't gradual; it's two cliffs.

Framer's version is smaller but still real: on the free tier, the badge only disappears once you either pay or attach a custom domain, and a free .com domain is only offered on annual billing, not monthly. The $10-a-month Basic tier, billed annually, removes both problems at once, but anyone testing Framer on the monthly $15 rate is paying more and still carries the badge until a domain is added.

What a year costs, and what three years cost

The monthly number on a pricing page rarely tells you the annual total, and almost never tells you the three-year total, which is the number that actually matters for something meant to last. Below are subscription totals only — most of these vendors don't publish domain renewal prices, so a domain, where it isn't included, is a real cost this table can't add for you. Treat every figure here as a floor, not a ceiling.

Builder	Plan	Year 1	Year 3 total	Billing
reach Premium	custom domain	$49	$147	annual
Carrd Pro Standard	custom domain	$19	$57	annual only
Framer Basic	custom domain, per site	$120	$360	annual
Butternut Portfolio Pro	custom domain	$99	$297	annual
Wix Light	free domain year 1	$204	$612	annual, paid in full
Squarespace Basic	free domain year 1	$228	$684	annual
Webflow Basic	no CMS included	$180	$540	annual
Ghost Starter	1,000 members	$216	$648	annual

Prices checked August 2026. reach's free subdomain, yourname.joinreach.app, costs nothing and carries no time limit, which isn't in the table because there's no comparable free-forever custom domain elsewhere in this list. The pattern in the paid rows is less about who's expensive and who isn't and more about what you're actually buying at that price: Carrd and reach are pricing a single page, Squarespace and Webflow are pricing a site with room to grow, and the three-year column is where that difference in scope finally shows up in dollars. For a wider look at what a small site costs once hosting, a domain and the inevitable upgrade are all counted, see what a small website really costs per year.

The renewal jump nobody quotes on the homepage

Nowhere is the gap between advertised and actual price starker than self-hosted WordPress, where the software itself is free and the entire cost lives in hosting. The mechanism is consistent across hosts: a low introductory rate tied to paying multiple years upfront, followed by a renewal at several times that rate. IONOS Grow is the cleanest example — $1 a month for the first year, paid annually, which becomes $12 a month at renewal. Twelve times the price, on the same plan, with nothing about the product changing.

Year	IONOS Grow, monthly rate	Annual cost
1	$1	$12
2	$12	$144
3	$12	$144

Three-year total: $300, against a first-year price that made it look like $36 was the trajectory. Hostinger and SiteGround run the same shape at different multiples — Hostinger's 48-month intro rate of $2.99 a month renews at $10.99, SiteGround's 12-month rate of $2.99 renews at $17.99, a six-fold jump. Kinsta is the one host in this set that doesn't do this at all: its rate is the same whether you're new or renewing. That absence is worth noting precisely because it's rare. None of this touches theme or plugin costs, which is where a WordPress site's ongoing spend usually goes next; we cover that ground in the hidden costs of website builders.

Where a transaction fee still applies

Most of the tools in this piece don't charge a transaction fee on the plans discussed above — that mechanism mostly lives on dedicated e-commerce tiers, which is a different pricing table and not what most personal or small-business sites are buying. The clear exception here is Typedream: its free tier carries a 5% transaction fee on anything sold through the site, and paying for the Launch tier drops that to 2% rather than removing it outright. It's a cost that scales with success rather than a flat subscription line, which makes it easy to miss when comparing sticker prices — a site doing modest sales barely notices 2%, but the fee doesn't disappear the way a subscription upgrade removes a limit.

When the subscription costs more than paying someone once

There's a point on the three-year column above where a recurring subscription stops being the obviously cheap option. Webflow's Basic at $540 over three years — for a plan that still doesn't include a CMS — or Ghost's Starter at $648 for a single-member cap that most newsletters will outgrow, are both numbers that start to invite a different question: would it have been cheaper to pay a designer or developer once and own the result outright? This piece doesn't have verified freelance rates to put against that question, and inventing one would defeat the purpose of an article about pricing honestly. What it does have is the subscription side, stated plainly across three years rather than one month, which is the half of that comparison most pricing pages never show you. If your own answer to "is this still cheap" only holds for the first twelve months, it wasn't really an answer.

The useful test isn't the headline monthly figure at all — it's whether the three-year total is paying for something that keeps changing, or something that, once built, is basically finished. A personal portfolio or a CV-as-a-page is closer to the second category: the content is a work history, which changes a few times a year at most, not weekly. Paying an ongoing subscription for a site that doesn't need ongoing anything is the specific case where a three-year total is worth weighing against a one-time build, even without a verified freelance rate to put next to it. A site that genuinely needs weekly updates, new products or a growing content library is the opposite case, and there the subscription is buying something real every month, not hosting a page that hasn't changed since launch.

Which one, and why

For a single-person page — the case this piece keeps returning to — reach's $49-a-year total after three years is a fifth of Squarespace's and a third of Webflow's, for a job neither of those tools is optimized to do quickly in the first place. The trade is real: one page, no domain you already own, no CMS. For anyone whose site needs to grow past that — more pages, a content model, code you can take somewhere else — the comparison flips, and the three-year totals above are the honest way to see where. Carrd is the cheapest route to a custom domain in this entire list at $57 over three years, if a single static page with no CMS is genuinely all that's needed and the empty-template step doesn't bother you. Everything else in this piece is pricing a larger job, and worth its larger number only if that job is the one you actually have. If you're weighing the free tiers specifically rather than the paid ones covered here, that comparison has its own trade-offs, laid out in free website builders: what you actually get.