The honest answer depends on what the site has to do. If you are just starting out and you need a tidy, findable presence this month, Squarespace or Wix will do the job and there is nothing embarrassing about choosing one. The day the site has to win you real work, a steady drip of enquiries rather than a digital business card, a custom build usually earns its keep. These are three different purchases wearing the same label, and they cost very different amounts for good reasons.
What do Squarespace and Wix actually cost?
Less than you fear to start, and more than you think to keep. Squarespace runs four plans billed yearly, from about USD $16 a month on the basic tier to USD $23 on the one most small businesses actually need, with bigger Plus and Advanced plans at USD $39 and $99. Wix is built the same way, from about USD $17 a month on its Light plan to USD $29 on the Core plan once you want to take payments, climbing past USD $150 for the top business tiers.
Here is the part that catches Kiwi owners out. Wix does not support the New Zealand dollar, so it charges you in US dollars, your bank clips a conversion fee on top, and the real figure quietly shifts with the exchange rate every month. Squarespace will bill you in New Zealand dollars, which keeps your GST clean and your accountant calm. Neither bill ever stops. You are renting the place, the rent has a habit of creeping up year on year, and you never own the keys.
So which is better, Squarespace or Wix?
For most small businesses, Squarespace is the easier pick and Wix is the more flexible one. Squarespace gives you fewer ways to make a mess. The templates are tidy, the result looks composed even if design is not your strong suit, and being billed in money you can actually reconcile is worth more than it sounds. Wix hands you more control and a deeper bag of tools, including stronger built-in SEO settings, but that freedom is also enough rope to build something slow and cluttered if you are not careful.
Both are legitimate, and for a simple shopfront either will serve you. Pick Squarespace if you want it to look sharp with the least fuss. Pick Wix if you genuinely want to tinker and you will use the extra controls. What neither one will do is grow into a fast, bespoke site the day you outgrow it. You hit the ceiling of the template, and the only way past it is to rebuild somewhere else.
When does a custom-built site make sense?
When the website is doing real work, not sitting there like a brochure left on a counter. A builder is rented and capped. A custom build is yours and shaped to how your customers actually decide to buy. The case for paying for one is short and practical.
- You want speed, and speed wins. Builder sites lug around piles of code you will never use, so they load slowly on a phone with two bars of signal in a Botany car park, which is exactly how half your customers meet you. A lean custom build is fast, and Google rewards fast.
- You need something the template fights. An odd booking flow, an unusual product setup, a tie-in with the software you already run the business on. Builders feel easy right up until you ask for the thing they were never built to do.
- You want to own it outright. Your domain and your site are yours, and no platform can switch them off or hike the rent on a whim.
Real numbers, because vague ones help nobody. A sharp small-business site built properly by WEB GRENADE usually lands around NZD $4,000 to $5,000, paid once. Plenty of Auckland agencies will quote $6,000 to $10,000 and up for much the same scope, mostly to keep account managers and a flash office fed. Custom does not have to mean agency money. That gap is markup, not craft.
What does it really cost over three years?
This is where the cheap option stops looking so cheap. Put three years on it and a builder is roughly NZD $1,500 to $2,000 in subscription once you are on a real business plan, more again if the exchange rate moves against you on Wix, and that meter keeps running into year four and five and beyond. A custom build is the bigger cheque upfront, the four to five grand, then almost nothing to keep, a domain at maybe NZD $30 a year and hosting that can run a few dollars a month or close to free.
So across three years the builder is still the smaller spend, no argument. The honest case for custom is not that it is cheaper by Friday. It is that the rent stops, the site is faster and does more, and the longer you keep it the better that maths looks. We have broken the real pricing down here. Cheap to rent, dearer to own, and which one is robbing you depends entirely on how hard the site has to work.
So the real question is not Squarespace or Wix or custom. It is how much you need the site to do, and how long you intend to keep it. For a quick test or a simple shopfront, a builder is plenty and overspending would be daft. For a site that has to bring in work for years, the rented ceiling and the forever-rent usually make a custom build the smarter bet. Still stuck between a template and a build? We went deeper on that exact call here. Or tell us what your business actually does, and we will give you a straight answer, even if it turns out to be just buy a Squarespace. No pitch waiting at the end of it.