Squarespace charges $16/month. Wix starts at $17. That's less than a nice dinner. How could it be a bad deal?
How the math actually works out
You spend 20 hours building your site — choosing templates, writing copy, uploading images, figuring out why the mobile layout looks broken. At even a modest $50/hour valuation of your time, that's $1,000 before you've published a single page.
Then the site goes live. It's fine. Not great — the template is generic, it doesn't quite match your brand, and the mobile experience is mediocre — but fine.
Every few months you need to update it. New staff member, new service, changed hours. This takes longer than it should because the drag-and-drop interface is clunky and you can never remember where that one setting is. Another hour here, two hours there. Over a year: maybe 15 hours. At $50/hour: another $750.
The performance gap
Meanwhile, your competitor's site loads in 1.2 seconds. Yours loads in 4.8. Studies consistently show that conversion rates drop roughly 7% for every additional second of load time. If your site generates five leads per month, you're potentially losing one to two to load time alone.
The SEO ceiling
Squarespace and Wix sites can rank — but they're limited by proprietary infrastructure. You can't fully control your Core Web Vitals, structured data implementation is restricted, and you're at the mercy of their platform's technical decisions.
The real cost of a DIY website isn't the monthly subscription. It's the compounding opportunity cost of a site that could be working harder for you.