Website builder — what it costs after year one and what you can take with you

A website builder is usually bought for one reason: not to pay someone else to build the site. The arithmetic takes half a minute — a monthly fee instead of a four-figure invoice, and the site is live over a weekend.

This text is not about whether that adds up. It is about what the arithmetic leaves out — because the number you enter as "about fifteen euros a month" is an entry plan's first-year price, not the price of the product, and your own time has no line in it at all.

Start with a fact that makes the point without commentary. On the biggest builder in the category you cannot find out what a plan costs. Wix prices by detected location, offers no currency switcher, and states outright that "The prices for Premium plans may differ depending on your geographic location". A reader in Dublin and one in Zurich open the same URL, see different numbers, and neither can check the other's — so every roundup with a price column is accurate for at most one of its readers.

That is not a slip in a table. It is a mechanism — one of four below, the kind that keeps working whatever any plan costs today.

Website builder, page builder and CMS — three different contracts

Those three names get used interchangeably, and that is the first cost, before any invoice. They differ not in features but in whether you rent the site or own it.

That difference settles everything that follows: the price after a year, who may change the site, and what is left when you want to leave. If you want a visual editor on top of your own WordPress, the right article is the WordPress page builder; for managing content without a developer in the wider sense, content management system. This one is about the first column.

Four mechanisms that tell you what a website builder really costs

Prices here change every quarter, and any article built on a table of amounts is stale before it is indexed. The mechanisms producing those amounts do not change. All four rest on figures read from providers' own pages on 10 September 2026; they illustrate the mechanism and are not a promise that they still hold.

1. The discount often sits on the higher plans — and the cheapest plan stops being cheapest

On OVHcloud's German price list, the Perso plan runs at €3.59 a month on a twelve-month term while the Pro plan above it runs at €2.39 — the better plan is the cheaper one. The order reverses at renewal: €7.19 against €11.89. A buyer who reads a price list from the bottom up — and every "from €1 a month" headline trains you to — picks the strictly weaker product and pays more for it.

At Fasthosts in the UK every plan teases at £1 a month, so the entry headline is identical to the top plan's; what differs is what follows — £5.75 for Start against £20.50 for Pro.

Practical takeaway: read the price list top-down and check which plans carry a struck-through price. Compare the amounts, not the order of the columns.

2. The price you see is the first-year price — and whether a second-year price exists at all is the thing to check

It is often said that renewal always costs a multiple of the first year. In Europe that is not a law of the market — it is a business model, and both models are sold side by side. Strato prints both prices together: .de at €0.05 a month for twelve months and €1.00 thereafter, .shop at €0.20 then €5.00. IONOS advertises hosting at €1 and renews at €11. The other camp sells the absence of the gap: Netcup charges €2.69 a month with no introductory rate at all — "The prices of our webhosting packages are valid for the entire term and not just for the first months."

Worse than either camp: IONOS advertises a `.de` domain at eight cents a month and a 94% saving without printing the price that applies from month thirteen — the number that decides what the domain costs. So the renewal price is the only price worth comparing, and the step tracks the extension rather than the country: at one Swiss registrar on one day, .ch steps 2.8-fold and .store sixteenfold.

A builder plan bundles hosting and usually a first-year domain, so you inherit this mechanism whether you can see it or not.

3. You are billed on more meters than the plan name suggests

• The billing basis. Squarespace's euro price list puts Basic at €14.00 a month or €108.00 a year — and the annual figure is the yearly total, not a per-month rate. Excluding VAT.
• The commitment. Shopify Basic is €24 a month annually and €32 monthly: a third more for the right to leave. Jimdo bills monthly or on a twelve- or twenty-four-month term, where the category stops at twelve.
• The currency. Webflow bills in dollars everywhere: "All prices in USD, per site, plus applicable taxes added at checkout." There is no euro list price, so a European buyer carries the exchange rate as an unpriced line and the tax arrives after the figure rather than inside it.
• The people. Nearly every provider ties the number of collaborators to the plan, and some bill per seat on top of the site.

Practical takeaway: count the people who will log in before comparing plans, then find each plan's collaborator limit. At some providers that count doubles the bill.

4. The features a business needs sit higher than the descriptions suggest

• Taking payments. On Wix the free plan cannot accept payments — and neither can the paid Light plan above it. Anyone intending to sell is really choosing between Core and above, whatever the local figure turns out to be.
• Your own domain. On Wix, "connecting a custom domain requires upgrading to a plan". On Webflow it appears first on Basic; the free Starter runs on a webflow.io address.
• Pages and forms. Webflow's Starter is capped at two static pages and fifty form submissions; Infomaniak's free Site Creator at one page.
• Plugins. WordPress.com: "For free sites, upgrade your plan to install plugins."
• A trial is not a plan. Squarespace has no free tier at all — only a fourteen-day trial, no card required.

One caution about every comparison you read, this one included once enough time passes: Webflow has restructured its site plans to Starter / Basic / Premium. Any text still naming Basic / CMS / Business describes a lineup that no longer exists — and many still do.

Free website builder — what you get and what you give up

Free plans are real, and the boundary falls in the same place almost everywhere: you can have a site, you cannot have your own address on it. Free Wix gives up to 500 MB of storage and 1 GB of bandwidth, carries Wix's advertising, and sits at an address of the form siteprefix.wixsite.com/siteaddress — which the provider itself calls "non-customizable". Webflow's Starter gives a webflow.io address, two static pages and fifty form submissions. And a correction to nearly every list of free builders in circulation: Squarespace does not have one.

So a free plan is fine as a place where something has to exist, and unsuitable for anything that has to be found and look like your property. If that is your situation, the free route has its own article — the free website — including the cases where a business profile beats a website outright.

AI website builder — what generation changed, and what it did not

An AI website builder today means one thing: describe the business in a sentence, get a finished-looking site in minutes. That part works and there is no point pretending otherwise. The blank page has stopped being the problem — and it was a real one, because the commonest reason a company website never gets built is not the price, it is that nobody wrote the first paragraph.

That is exactly how much changed. None of the four mechanisms above behaves differently because a model wrote the first draft. The price is still a first-year price, seats are still billed separately, and a site generated inside a closed builder is exactly as portable as one clicked together by hand — which, in Wix's case, is not portable at all.

What generation adds is a new meter: it is frequently billed on its own counter, separate from the site plan and on its own cycle. Same shape as the seat charge — part of the product in the description, its own line in the price list. Before comparing two plans on generation, check whether it is included or metered on top.

An AI builder solves the first hour of work, not the decision. The thresholds below apply identically whether a person or a model wrote the first version.

No-code website builder — what the phrase actually covers

Plenty of people are looking not for a subscription but for something they install, the way you install accounting software. For a company website such programs barely exist, and the ones that do are doing something other than the name suggests. The market has split into three things and only one of them publishes a website:

• Browser plus subscription — Wix, Squarespace, Webflow. Nothing is installed; the site lives at the provider. This is what "no-code website builder" means in practice.
• Design tools — Figma and its relatives. What comes out is a visual design, not a working site.
• A development environment on your own machine — local WordPress, static site generators, code editors. Tools for someone who builds sites professionally; choosing them without that skill costs more than any subscription.

If "something I install and the site is mine" is what you mean, the closest thing to it is not a program at all — it is your own WordPress with a page builder. The cost is spread differently: no subscription for the editor, but hosting, a plugin licence and upkeep.

Four thresholds: when a website builder for small business is enough, and when it stops

A builder is the right answer more often than an industry that lives off building sites admits. It stops being right at four specific moments, all testable today.

The first two have a solution inside the same tool — a more expensive plan. The last two have none. For the arithmetic on the other side, the website cost calculator works through your case and the maintenance cost calculator the monthly side; market medians sit in our website cost report and running tool prices in our SaaS tooling cost report.

Check the accessibility requirement before anyone invoices you for it: the obligation is real but not universal — who the EAA applies to. It is an EU instrument, so a UK-only business is outside it; the UK duty comes from the Equality Act instead, and the two are not the same test.

What you can take out of a website builder

Nobody asks this at purchase, and it decides the largest and latest cost of all. We checked with three providers, in their own documentation, on 9 September 2026 — and they differ far more than any feature comparison suggests.

Wix: nothing comes out. Wix's documentation states that "your site must run on Wix's servers", with an architectural reason: "the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting since it uses Wix's proprietary technology". There is no export button and none is planned. Data comes out — products, contacts, orders as CSV — the site does not.

Squarespace: there is an export, in a WordPress format, with a long list of exceptions. According to Squarespace's documentation the XML file takes layout pages, one blog with its posts, text and image blocks and gallery pages. It does not take: other page types — including store pages — page-specific headers and footers, more than one blog, video and audio blocks, product blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS. And one sentence worth memorising: "It's not possible to export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another."

Webflow: code export is a paid feature, and it produces static files, not a working content management system.

So moving off a builder is not a move. It breaks down like this:

Leaving a builder means building the site again and retyping the content. Not an argument against builders — an argument for putting that line in the arithmetic now rather than meeting it in three years. What the operation costs is broken down in the real cost of a cheap website.

Best website builder — why there is no ranking here

"Best website builder" is a question answered mainly by roundups paid per sign-up. We are not claiming they all lie. We are claiming that the order is decided by something other than your situation, and that there is no way to check it from outside.

There is also a harder problem, and it is where this article started: Wix publishes no comparable price to anyone, so no price column in any ranking can be true for every reader. Where a builder's price cannot be traced to the provider's own page in your currency, treat it as decorative.

We take no commission from any tool named here. Instead of a list, a rule: choose on the constraint that binds hardest in your case.

• Budget and time, the site simply has to exist — a builder, entry plan, deliberately for a year or two. Nobody needs to apologise for that.
• Selling online — compare transaction fees and catalogue limits, not the subscription; the difference is larger there than in the price list.
• A team that publishes — multiply people by the price of a seat before comparing plans.
• This has to last for years and be yours — a builder is the wrong category. The right question is which platform, and to settle it in five minutes there is a quiz.

Whatever you choose, go through the list of things to check before going live first. Most mistakes that cost the most later are visible half an hour before publication.

Four things to check on the pricing page before you click buy

Four questions, ten minutes, asked on the provider's site rather than in a search engine.

1. Search the page for the word "renewal". If it is absent, the price you see is a first-year price. That is not "do not buy" — it is "you do not know what this costs".
2. Check which plans carry a discount. If only the higher ones do, the cheapest plan may cost more than a better one.
3. Count people, not pages. Find the collaborator limit or seat price and multiply by the number who will log in.
4. Search the documentation for the word "export". Before the first invoice, find out whether you can leave, what comes out, and whether it is a paid feature. The only one of the four that cannot be fixed later.

If those four leave you with "a builder is enough" — then it genuinely is. If not, this is a good moment to talk about scope before paying for a year up front.