Wix pricing: the plan table, the app bills, and the gap between them

Compare Wix's $17-a-month Light plan (billed annually, in full) against Squarespace's $19-a-month Basic (billed the same way), pick Wix because it's cheaper, and six months later the two bills don't look anything alike. Not because either company lied about the sticker price — they didn't — but because the sticker price was never the whole invoice. Wix's plan tiers are real and documented. What sits on top of them, mostly inside the App Market rather than on the pricing page, is not, and that's the gap this piece tries to close.

Before the tier table: the case for skipping it

If the site in question is one person's page — a portfolio, a CV that behaves like a URL, a freelancer's landing page — there's a faster and cheaper way through this than comparing Wix plans at all. reach builds exactly that page from a CV: 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, and a custom domain on Premium runs $4.99 a month or $49 a year — a single, disclosed number instead of a plan price plus an undisclosed app total.

The honest limit: you cannot connect a domain you already own, only buy one through reach, and it makes exactly one page — no sub-pages, no CMS, no contact form beyond a mail link. A business with a services tree, a blog or a store needs the rest of this article. A single-person site does not, and for that case reach is the cheaper, faster answer before Wix's own numbers are worth opening.

What Wix actually publishes about its five tiers

Wix's own pricing page lists five points: Free at $0, Light at $17, Core at $29, Business at $39, and Business Elite at $159 — all billed annually, in full, up front. Wix does not publish monthly-billing rates on the same page; those sit behind the logged-in checkout, so they can't be quoted here.

Only two of the five tiers come with a published storage or bandwidth figure. Free gives 500 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth, with a Wix banner and Wix favicon that can't be turned off. Light gives 2 GB of storage, unmetered bandwidth, two collaborator seats, and removes the banner — plus a free domain for the first year, with a catch covered below. Core, Business and Business Elite are priced at $29, $39 and $159 without a matching storage or bandwidth number published in the same table, which is itself worth noting: the plan that decides whether a video-heavy site fits is unusually hard to identify from the pricing page alone.

That absence matters more than it sounds, because Wix doesn't separate video storage from general storage the way some competitors do. Squarespace's Basic tier, for comparison, quotes 30 minutes of video storage as its own distinct limit. Wix folds video into the same 2 GB figure as everything else on Light, with no separate video allowance disclosed for the tiers above it — so a site planning to host its own video rather than embed it from elsewhere is choosing a tier without the one number that would actually answer whether it fits.

Plan	Price	Billing	Storage	Bandwidth	Badge
reach	$0 subdomain / $4.99 domain	monthly, or $49/year	one page	—	none
Wix Free	$0	—	500 MB	1 GB	compulsory
Wix Light	$17/mo	annual, paid in full	2 GB	unmetered	removed
Wix Core	$29/mo	annual, paid in full	not published	not published	removed
Wix Business	$39/mo	annual, paid in full	not published	not published	removed
Wix Business Elite	$159/mo	annual, paid in full	not published	not published	removed

Prices checked August 2026.

The trap in the free domain, and the renewal question nobody answers

Light's free domain sounds like part of the plan until you read the fine print: Wix's monthly billing option explicitly does not include that domain voucher. It's tied to paying annually, in full, on a plan whose monthly-equivalent rate ($17) is itself only available if you commit to the year. Choose to pay monthly instead and the domain isn't free at all.

The bigger open question is what happens after year one. Wix doesn't flag its Light, Core, Business or Business Elite prices as introductory the way WordPress hosts do — there's no published second-year rate that's several times the first, the pattern documented at length in what website builders actually cost once you stop reading the pricing page. What Wix doesn't publish is the domain's renewal price once the free first year ends. That's a real, recurring cost with no number attached to it anywhere on the pricing page, and it belongs in any honest total from year two onward even though this piece can't put a figure on it.

The App Market is where the real total gets decided

Here is the part of Wix's pricing that the plan table can't show, because it isn't priced on the plan table. A brochure site — a few pages, some text, a contact form — genuinely fits inside Light or Core with nothing else added. Almost nothing else does. The moment a site needs online bookings, a proper email marketing tool, a review widget, or membership logins, that capability lives in Wix's App Market as a separate installed app, not as a checkbox on the plan you already bought.

Wix doesn't publish a single combined table of what those apps cost, which is the honest finding here rather than a complaint: the subscription price answers "what does Wix cost," and the App Market answers "what does this specific site cost," and those are two different questions with two different price lists, one of which you only see once you're inside the editor browsing for the feature you actually need. Anyone comparing Wix's $17 against a competitor's $19 on the strength of the plan price alone is comparing the wrong number if either site is going to need bookings, marketing automation or memberships — the category, not the brochure tier, is where most real budgets land. We go through this same mechanism across other builders, not just Wix, in the hidden costs of website builders.

Wix Studio isn't on this price list at all

Wix Studio is a separate product from the Light/Core/Business tiers compared above, built for agencies and freelancers running several client sites rather than one person building one site. It has its own billing structure and its own pricing page, and Wix doesn't publish Studio's rates on the same table as the classic tiers, so there's no verified number to put next to Light or Core here. If the job is one client's one site, Studio isn't the product being priced in this article; if the job is several sites managed under one account, it's worth pricing separately and directly against what Studio itself publishes, not against the numbers above.

Three sites, priced end to end

The plan price is only the start of each of these. Domain renewal costs and any App Market subscriptions are real and not included below, because neither is published anywhere Wix will put a number on it — which is itself the point this whole piece is making.

A freelance consultant's one-page site. Contact form, a services list, no bookings, no store. Wix Light covers it: $17 a month, billed annually, $204 for year one, $612 across three years. For exactly this case — one person, one page — reach's Premium tier covers the same job at $49 a year, $147 across three years, without a template to pick or a hero section to write from nothing.

A local service business with online bookings. A yoga studio or a small clinic taking appointments needs more than Light's storage headroom implies and will add a booking app from the Market on top of whichever plan it lands on — Core at $29 a month is the more realistic floor, $348 for year one, $1,044 across three years, before any app subscription is added to that.

A growing business site with a store and marketing automation. Business at $39 a month runs $468 for year one and $1,404 across three years, and at this scope the App Market bill for email marketing and reviews is likely to be the larger of the two ongoing costs, not the smaller one — this is exactly the site where "what does Wix cost" stops being a one-line answer.

Site	Wix plan	Year 1	Year 3 total
Freelancer, one page	Light	$204	$612
Local business with bookings	Core	$348	$1,044
Growing business with a store	Business	$468	$1,404

Prices checked August 2026. App Market subscriptions and domain renewal are real additions to every row above and none of them carry a published number.

Which plan, and what it actually buys

For the first case — one person, one page, nothing that needs a booking calendar or a store — Wix Light is defensible on price but not the fastest or cheapest route there; a purpose-built generator gets to the same result for a fraction of the three-year total, a case this piece made plainly at the top rather than saving for the end. Our full walk-through of Wix's editor, template lock-in and App Market beyond price alone is in the Wix review. For anything with bookings, a growing content library or a store, Core or Business are the realistic floor, and the honest budget adds a number Wix doesn't publish for whatever app the business actually needs — which is the reason to treat the plan price as the opening bid in this comparison, not the total.