Every option, read off their own pricing pages on 10 September 2026

I sell one of these. Here is where the others win.

Most comparisons like this are written by whoever is selling the expensive option, and it shows. So every platform on this page carries a row saying what it does better than I do, and one of them says the honest thing about my own.

Read the arithmetic before the cards. It does not say what you would expect it to say, and it is the part that should decide this for you.

The arithmetic

Renting is cheaper than buying, and it stays cheaper for about twenty years.

Here is the sum, in full, so you can check it. A subscription at $9.99 a month costs $599.40 over five years. A build here starts at $4,500, paid once. Divide one by the other and the subscription does not catch up for 37.6 years.

The dearest one on this page, Shopify at $29 a month, takes 13 years. That is still longer than most small businesses last.

So do not buy a website from me to save money, because you will not.

Buy one because of what you are holding at the end, and because of the one piece of software your business actually runs on that none of these will house. If neither of those matters to you, the subscription is the right call and I will say so on the phone.

What that sum assumes, stated plainly: today's advertised price, held flat, billed annually, with no plan change and no price rise. All three of those will move. It is arithmetic on published figures rather than a forecast, and the moment it needs a forecast to work it stops belonging on this page.

Side by side

What each one costs, and how long it stays the cheaper answer.

Option	A month	Five years	Cheaper than a build for
Wix Light, billed annually	$17.77	$1,066.20	21.2 years
Squarespace Basic, billed annually	$19	$1,140	19.8 years
GoDaddy Website Builder Starter, billed annually	$9.99	$599.40	37.6 years
Square Online Square Free	$0	$0	Always — it is free
Shopify Basic, billed annually	$29	$1,740	13 years
WordPress WordPress.com Business, or your own hosting	$17.50	$1,050	21.5 years
The AI builders Lovable Pro; Framer starts at $10	$25	$1,500	15 years
No website at all A Facebook page and a Google listing	$0	$0	Always — it is free
A site I build for you Paid once, then hosting at your own cost	$0	$0	It is the build

Two of these cost nothing at all, which is why "the rent never stops" is only an argument against some of the page rather than all of it.

One at a time

The same 5 questions, asked of every one of them.

Including mine, and mine gets the same treatment as the rest.

Template subscription

Wix

$17.77 a month · Light, billed annually

What you own if you leave: Your words and your pictures, if you save them off a page at a time. Not the design, not the layout, not the pages themselves. Moving means building it again somewhere else.
If you stop paying: The site comes down. Your domain stays yours while you keep renewing it, but the thing it pointed at is gone.
What it will not do: Hold software that is yours. Wix has a developer platform and real code can be written on it, but that code is written against Wix and runs only on Wix. It does not leave when you do.
What it does better than I do: It is live this afternoon and it looks fine. If you need a website by Friday and you have twenty dollars, Wix is the right answer and I will say so on the call.
Who fixes it when it breaks: Wix does, around the clock, with a real support team behind it. You are never waiting on one person to pick up his phone.

Template subscription

Squarespace

$19 a month · Basic, billed annually

What you own if you leave: An export file carrying your text and your images. The design does not come with it, so whoever rebuilds from that file is starting the layout from nothing.
If you stop paying: The site expires fifteen days after payment was due, and content can be deleted permanently thirty days after that. Both numbers are theirs, off their own help page.
What it will not do: Hold a tool built for how your business actually works. You get their blocks, their blocks are good, and none of them is your reorder point or your tip-out.
What it does better than I do: The design, and it is not a close call. A Squarespace site straight out of the box looks better than plenty of work that gets billed at four figures.
Who fixes it when it breaks: Squarespace, with support that is genuinely well regarded by the people who use it.

Template subscription

GoDaddy Website Builder

$9.99 a month · Starter, billed annually

What you own if you leave: GoDaddy now says you can view and export the generated code. I have not tested what actually comes out of that, so read it as their claim rather than as mine.
If you stop paying: The site comes down. The domain is a separate bill and stays yours while that one is paid.
What it will not do: Let you edit as much as you like. Every plan is metered in monthly AI credits, fifty on the free tier and a hundred and fifty on Starter, so changing your own website is rationed. The month you run out is the busy one.
What it does better than I do: Price, and reach. It is the cheapest paid option on this page, and if your domain already sits at GoDaddy it is one login rather than two.
Who fixes it when it breaks: GoDaddy, by telephone, and they answer it. Their phone support is the most reachable of any company here.

Free, bundled with something else

Square Online

$0 · Square Free

What you own if you leave: Your item list and your customer records export. The site itself does not.
If you stop paying: There is nothing to stop paying. This one is free and it stays free.
What it will not do: Be a website first. It is a storefront bolted to a card reader, shaped for taking an order rather than for explaining what you do and why somebody should call you.
What it does better than I do: It costs nothing and it is already sitting in your account. If you take cards through Square you have a website right now whether you knew it or not, and you should go and look at it before you pay anybody for one.
Who fixes it when it breaks: Square does. What the free site actually costs shows up in the card rate: 3.3% plus 30 cents on an online sale, against 2.9% plus 30 cents on their $49 plan.

Built for selling

Shopify

$29 a month · Basic, billed annually

What you own if you leave: Products, customers and orders export cleanly, which is better than most of this page manages. The storefront itself is written in Shopify’s own template language and runs nowhere else.
If you stop paying: The store closes. Your data stays exportable for a while afterwards, which again is better than most of this page.
What it will not do: Earn its keep if you are not selling products online. You would be renting an engine you never start.
What it does better than I do: Selling at any scale. Sales tax by jurisdiction and shipping worked out from a buyer’s address are the two I will not build at any price, because they have to stay right for years as rates and rules move without telling anyone, and a company whose entire business is that maintains them. I will build a small store — a basket, a checkout, stock counts — quoted on its own. Past that you want this rather than me.
Who fixes it when it breaks: Shopify, with the largest ecosystem of anything named on this page.

You host it, you mind it

WordPress

$17.50 a month · WordPress.com Business, or your own hosting

What you own if you leave: Everything. This is the one platform besides mine where that answer is honestly everything, the content and the theme and the database together, and it is a large part of why it runs so much of the web.
If you stop paying: On WordPress.com the site comes down. Hosted yourself it keeps running for as long as the hosting bill is paid, and that bill is small.
What it will not do: Look after itself. WordPress is plugins, plugins update, and an update can take a working site down on a Tuesday for a reason nobody chose.
What it does better than I do: Breadth. There is a plugin for nearly anything, and a plugin costing seventy-nine dollars once beats me building the same thing for four figures. If what you need already exists there, buy it and keep your money.
Who fixes it when it breaks: You, or whoever you pay. It is the option with the most freedom on this page and the most homework attached to it.

Describe it and it writes it

The AI builders

$25 a month · Lovable Pro; Framer starts at $10

What you own if you leave: Real code, and this is the honest one on the page. Lovable syncs what it writes into a GitHub repository you control, so the files are yours in the same sense that mine are.
If you stop paying: The hosted copy goes. If you exported the code first you still have it, and knowing to do that before you cancel is the whole trick.
What it will not do: Know your business. It builds what you describe, so the result is only as good as the description, and you will not find out what you forgot to ask for until a customer finds it first.
What it does better than I do: Speed and price, and it is closing on the argument I lean hardest on. If you can describe what you want precisely and you can read what comes back, this is a real option and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Who fixes it when it breaks: You, with the AI, at eleven at night. That is the part worth sitting with: owning code that nobody at your business can read is not the same as owning something you can fix.

What most of the street actually does

No website at all

$0 · A Facebook page and a Google listing

What you own if you leave: Nothing, and there is nowhere to leave to. The page belongs to Meta and the listing belongs to Google.
If you stop paying: There is nothing to pay, and nothing stops. What it costs you is not money: a post reaches the people who already follow you, and a follower is somebody who found you some other way first.
What it will not do: Get found by somebody who does not already know your name, or answer the question you get asked forty times a week without you answering it again yourself. And since September 2025 it will not take the money either: Meta says Shops on Facebook and Instagram now use website checkout, so a product tag sends the buyer to the seller’s own website to pay and a shop nobody has updated needs a checkout address created. Anybody selling through Instagram today needs a website to send people to, and most comparisons you will find still describe Instagram Checkout as a live feature.
What it does better than I do: Cost, and it is not close. It is free, it is already running, and for a business that lives on word of mouth it may genuinely be enough. Get the Google listing right first, because a good listing beats a bad website.
Who fixes it when it breaks: Nobody, because nothing breaks. It just quietly does less than you think it is doing.

Paid once, and yours

A site I build for you

$0 · Paid once, then hosting at your own cost

What you own if you leave: All of it. The files, the domain, the hosting account, every login in your name. There is no leaving, because you were never standing on anything of mine.
If you stop paying: There is nothing to stop. It is paid once. Hosting costs about what a coffee costs and the bill has your name on it rather than mine.
What it will not do: Be the cheap option, and it is nowhere near being one. Read the arithmetic below before you decide anything.
What it does better than I do: Nothing at all, on price. What it does instead is hold one piece of software built for the way your business actually works, on a site nobody else can switch off. That is the entire argument and there is not a second one.
Who fixes it when it breaks: Me while I am here, and anybody you hire after that, because it is ordinary code sitting in your own account rather than a platform only I understand.

Before you ask me for anything

What I build, what I will not, and what has to be quoted first.

The same three lists sit on every sheet I publish, because the answer does not change with the subject. The middle one is the one worth your time.

What I can build for you

All of it ends up in accounts opened in your name, and none of it needs me afterwards.

A website that is yours outright: The files, the domain, the hosting account and every login open in your name. There is no leaving, because you were never standing on anything of mine.
A tool built for the way your business actually works: Your rate card, your roster, your categories, your trade’s words. It arrives twice — as a page at your own web address, and as one file that opens with the internet switched off and needs no login and no subscription.
One payment link, connected to one page: Tested with a real payment before handover and refunded afterwards, on an account that is yours throughout. This is included in a build under §1.7 of the Scope, and I am never an owner on the account.
A form that reaches your inbox: Names, emails and phone numbers are ordinary work and always were. What a form collects and how long it is kept is written into the privacy page the build includes.
The arithmetic on your own numbers, printed where you can check it: No model, no forecast, no industry average and no suggested rate. Your figures through a sum you can follow, and a plain sentence wherever the sum cannot be done.
A read of what your Google listing shows the public: Checked against what your site says, so the two agree. This needs no access to anything of yours — it is the same page any customer sees.
Five pages and two rounds of changes, with your words placed and fitted: You supply the text and the pictures; I place them, size them and say where a page is missing something. A page swapped for a different page costs nothing.

What I will not build, and why

Two different reasons, kept apart on purpose. Some of these would make a promise you already hold in writing false. The rest I could build and will not, and the reason is the same each time — somebody else has to keep it correct for years and does.

Anything that sees, stores or transmits a card or bank number: The master agreement says outright that I do not see, store, transmit or process payment card data. A payment link hands your customer to your provider’s own page, on your provider’s own address, and nothing about the way I build changes that.
A seat on your Google Business Profile: Both Scopes say that nothing in them asks you to grant me any access to it, and Google’s own rules for third parties require the business to hold its profile at all times. The listing is yours to create, to verify and to keep.
A system that holds records carrying their own legal regime: Patient notes, medical history and the like. Section 3 of the Scope says I do not build systems that hold them. A practice holding such records can still have a website — the site simply does not touch that material.
Legal, tax, accounting, employment or financial advice: Named in section 3 of the Scope as outside every build. I will tell you who the merchant of record is, because that decides who owes the sales tax. Whether you owe any is a question for your accountant and the answer is worth paying for.
A way into your computer when you are not sitting at it: The data-handling note in your pack says I have no way to do it and do not want one. Every remote session needs you present and letting me in, and it ends when you close it.
Sales tax worked out by state: I could build this and I am not going to. Rates and rules change without notice and it has to stay correct for years after I have been paid. A company whose entire business is that maintains it, and I will name the one that does rather than sell you a version of it that rots.
Shipping worked out from a customer’s address: Same answer and the same reason. Carrier rates, zones and surcharges move on somebody else’s schedule, and a shipping calculator that is six months out of date overcharges your customers quietly.
Online booking, invoicing and payment chasing, review requests, staff scheduling, waiting lists: Every one of these is a category a platform you already pay for has taken, or will inside a year. Where you need one, I will say which product does it. That answer is worth more to you than a worse version of it with my name on.
Taking over, repairing or migrating a site somebody else built: I could and I do not quote it as a build. Inheriting somebody else’s decisions costs more to unpick than a new site costs to make, and you would be paying me to find out what they did.

What has to be quoted before it starts

Real work, quoted in writing before anything starts, and never folded into a build price to win one.

An online store — a basket, a checkout and stock counts: A real store is a different build at a different price, quoted in writing before it starts. One payment link on one page is a much smaller thing and comes with a build.
Opening a payment account from scratch: This runs on your identity documents, your bank account and a verification process the provider controls, which neither of us can hurry. Where you already hold an account, connecting it is included.
Setting up or running your Google Business Profile: Separate work with its own price, and still in your name when it is done. Reading what the listing already shows is included; holding it is not.
Any account your own customers log in to: Logins are the largest single step in cost of anything on this page. A site that has them is a different build, and pretending otherwise at quoting time is how a build goes wrong in month two.
Connecting to another system you already run: Possible, often useful, and never assumed. It gets named in the Statement of Work with its own price, because the cost lives in the other system rather than in mine.
A second tool, a further phase, or anything else named in section 3: Quoted as its own fixed price. Small work outside a Scope runs at the hourly rate on the rate card, with thirty minutes the smallest unit invoiced.

What this is not

Not a claim that these platforms are bad, because they are not.

They are well built, they are fast, and they are run by companies with more engineers than this town has people. Nothing on this page argues otherwise, and if you catch me arguing otherwise somewhere else, hold me to this page instead.

It is also not a list I keep up to date by remembering to. Every figure above is registered with the date it was read, it expires on its own, and this page carries that date in plain sight so you can go and check rather than take my word for it. One line on this site went stale exactly that way and the register is what caught it.

And it is not the whole offer. A tool on its own, with no website around it, is a smaller job and a smaller number.

If a build is the answer

Here is what the number actually buys.

A website build starts at $4,500. That is a floor for the whole thing — the pages, working email that does not land in junk, your search listing, the two policy pages the law now requires, and one tool of your own built in. What yours costs is agreed before any work begins.

What a build includes Ask what yours would cost

Every price and every term on this page was read off those companies' own pricing pages on 10 September 2026. Terms change without anyone announcing it, so if you are weighing this up, go and read them again yourself.