What a website builder site really costs
A Wix plan is about $17 a month. A TechTailors site starts at $25 a page. If that's the whole comparison, the builder wins — and you should pick it. But the sticker price is the one number a website builder advertises, and it's the cheapest part of the bill. The expensive parts are the time you pour in, the fact that you can never take the site with you, and a quality ceiling you hit the moment the site has a real job to do.
This page is about those parts. Not to talk you out of a builder if a builder is right for you, but so the comparison is honest on both sides.
The sticker price is the cheapest thing about it
Drag the inputs below to your own situation. The plan price is the easy number. The calculator adds the three a builder leaves off the page: your time valued at your rate, the platform's cut on each sale, and the rebuild you'll pay for the day you outgrow it and can't take the site with you.
Add up the part of the bill they don't advertise
Pick a builder, plan, and billing term, then drag the rest to your own situation. Every price is the builder's real published rate as of June 2026.
Light can't sell online; Core and up can. Wix also offers 2- and 3-year prepay, but only shows those prices after you log in.
Defaults to $50/hr. Set it to your real rate — this is the cost most "free" builds quietly ignore.
App-store add-ons beyond the plan's own (above).
A site you can't export becomes a from-scratch rebuild elsewhere. Spread over 12 months below.
- Wix Light (Paid 1 year up front)$17
- Your time (5 hr × $50)$250
- Third-party apps & plugins$15
- Rebuild, spread over 12 mo$167
Your real website-builder cost runs about $324/mo more than a comparable TechTailors site — and you still own none of it.
TechTailors figure: 5 pages × $25/page/month — we build it, maintain it, and you own it. Your time cost on our side is $0. Build your exact plan
The cheapest plan is worthless if you can't leave
Start here, because it's the one that doesn't show up on any invoice. With most builders you are renting your entire web presence. Your content, your design, your traffic history — all of it lives inside the platform, and the platform decides whether you can take it out.This is the trap that costs the most and shows up the latest. People pick a builder for the $17 price, grow for two years, then discover that leaving means rebuilding from scratch — there's no file to hand a new developer. The lock-in was free to enter and expensive to exit.This is the trap that costs the most and shows up the latest. People pick a builder for the $17 price, grow for two years, then discover that leaving means rebuilding from scratch — there's no file to hand a new developer. The lock-in was free to enter and expensive to exit.
What “you can't leave” actually means Show less
Wix is the clearest case: there is no site export at all. The site is built on Wix's proprietary technology and stays on Wix, full stop. Squarespace lets you export pages and posts to a basic WordPress file, but your design, your store, and most of your content blocks don't make the trip. Webflow will let you export code — for a fee — but the exported code can't be reimported, and your CMS content and forms stop working once it leaves. Shopify exports your products and orders as a spreadsheet, while the storefront itself stays locked to Shopify.
With TechTailors it works the other way around. Every account is in your name from day one (hosting, domain, content, data), and we're only ever admins on them. Leave whenever you want and you keep all of it, with your data free to export at any time. The code is the one thing you don't own outright under a subscription, which is the whole reason the lump-sum buy-out exists: take it and we run one script that inlines our shared library into your repo and hand you a business-licensed codebase you can host anywhere. The details live on our Ownership and Offboarding pages.
Your time is the invoice nobody sends you
“Free” and “do it yourself” are the same sentence. A drag-and-drop builder doesn't remove the work of building a website; it just moves that work onto you — the design, the layout, the copy, compressing every image, updating plugins, optimizing writing and performance, and fixing it when something breaks the week you're busiest.Value your own hours honestly and the “free” build is often the most expensive option on the table. Five hours a month at $50 an hour is $250 — more than the plan, the apps, and a small managed site combined. The cost was never zero; it was just billed to you in time instead of dollars.Value your own hours honestly and the “free” build is often the most expensive option on the table. Five hours a month at $50 an hour is $250 — more than the plan, the apps, and a small managed site combined. The cost was never zero; it was just billed to you in time instead of dollars.
A real number on this Show less
One of the first sites we ever rescued belonged to a small business owner paying $1,000 a month for a site someone had thrown together on Wix in about twenty hours. It was broken on mobile, unusable, and returning nothing. He hadn't bought a website; he'd bought twenty hours of someone else's drag-and-drop and a year of being stuck with it. We got him out and rebuilt it properly.
The lesson isn't “builders are scams.” It's that the time has to go somewhere, and on a builder it goes to you or to whoever you hire to wrangle it. On a TechTailors site, that time is ours — unlimited edits and maintenance are part of the plan while you subscribe, so your hourly cost is zero.
Quality, on every front
This is the part where a builder is capped and we have receipts. A template isn't just locked-in — it's limited on every axis that decides whether a site actually performs, and most of those limits stay invisible until they cost you a customer or a ranking.An expert can push a builder further than its defaults, sure. But the moment you're paying an expert to fight the platform, you've lost the only reason you picked the builder — it was supposed to be the cheap, simple option.An expert can push a builder further than its defaults, sure. But the moment you're paying an expert to fight the platform, you've lost the only reason you picked the builder — it was supposed to be the cheap, simple option. Here's the honest comparison, category by category. Each row links to the standard we hold ourselves to.
| Category | Website builder, by default | The TechTailors standard |
|---|---|---|
| Design & UX | One of a few thousand templates; recognizably “a Wix site.” | Bespoke design built around your brand and how you convert. |
| Code quality | Bloated, auto-generated markup with little semantic structure. | Hand-coded, clean, semantic HTML. |
| Architecture | A proprietary black box you can't see into or refactor. | A readable codebase any developer can pick up — and you can own it outright. |
| Performance | Heavy scripts; ~40% of WordPress and ~52% of Wix sites passed Core Web Vitals (2024 Web Almanac (opens in new tab)). | Lighthouse 100, re-checked in monthly audits — our Performance standard. |
| Accessibility | 33–75 automated WCAG errors per page on builder stacks (Wix 33, WordPress 53, Shopify 75); 95.9% of all home pages have detectable failures (WebAIM Million 2026 (opens in new tab)). | Built on Astro — the lowest-error stack measured, ~9 errors/page (WebAIM Million 2026 (opens in new tab)) — then WCAG-built and axe-audited; it also unlocks the ADA tax credit — our Accessibility standard. |
| Security | A shared platform you don't control. | Single-tenant isolation, infrastructure in your name — our Security standard. |
| Best practices | Whatever the template happened to ship with. | A published engineering standard, re-checked monthly — our Best Practices standard. |
| SEO & GEO | Weak technical control; capped rankings and AI-answer visibility. | Technical SEO plus GEO/AEO built into every site — our SEO standard. |
Every one of those caps is what eventually forces the rebuild — the migration line in the calculator above. You don't just outgrow a builder's price. You outgrow its ceiling.
The six builders, by the real numbers
Where each one is good, where it stops, and whether you can take your site with you when you go. Prices are the entry plan as of June 2026; sources are at the bottom of the page.
| Builder | Entry price | Can you own? | Can you leave? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | Light — $17/mo (billed yearly); can't sell | No. The build is Wix's proprietary software — there's no code that's ever yours. | No. There's no site export — Wix runs on its own proprietary tech. |
| Squarespace | Basic — $16/mo (billed yearly); no free plan | No. You license the platform; the design, templates, and store stay Squarespace's. | Barely. Pages/posts export as a basic WordPress file; design and store don't come with you. |
| Webflow | Basic — $15/mo (billed yearly); CMS is Premium ($25/mo) | Only a snapshot. Paid code export hands you static files; the CMS, forms, and hosting stay Webflow's. | Only if you pay. Code export is a paid add-on, can't be reimported, and dynamic content + forms break on the way out. |
| WordPress (self-hosted) | Software free; realistically $25–$85/mo all-in (hosting + theme + plugins + upkeep) | Yes. It's open-source (GPL) — the code, theme, and database are genuinely yours. | Yes. This is the portable one — you own the whole stack and can move hosts. |
| GoDaddy | Basic — $9.99/mo intro (renews higher; the renewal isn't published) | No. A closed, proprietary builder — nothing underneath it is yours to own. | Not cleanly. It's a closed builder — leaving means rebuilding. |
| Shopify | Basic — $29/mo yearly ($39 monthly) | No. Your product and customer data are yours; the storefront itself is Shopify's to license. | Partly. Products/orders export as a spreadsheet; the storefront theme is Shopify-locked. |
When a builder is genuinely the right call
We'd rather lose your business to the right tool than win it with a bad argument. A website builder is the smart choice when the site's job is small and temporary: a personal page, a portfolio, a one-page event, a coming-soon holding page, or testing whether an idea has legs before you spend real money on it. If that's you, open Wix or Squarespace and don't look back.
The math on this page changes when the site has to earn — when it needs to rank, sell, load fast, stay compliant, and be genuinely yours. That's the point where “cheap to rent” quietly becomes “expensive to own,” and it's the point where it's worth talking to us.
What you get when you own it instead
TechTailors is a subscription, like a builder — but you're paying for a site that's built for you and can be owned by you, not a template you rent. Transparent $25/page/month, every account in your name, unlimited edits and maintenance, a lump-sum buy-out whenever you want it, and stackable discounts as you grow. No upfront five-figure bill, and no contract you can't walk away from after year one.
Same monthly-payment convenience that makes a builder feel easy. None of the lock-in that makes it expensive. See the full pricing or build your exact plan.
Questions people ask before they switch
-
Is Wix or Squarespace cheaper than hiring TechTailors?
On the sticker price, usually yes — a Wix or Squarespace plan runs $16–$17/month. Once you add the hours you spend building and maintaining it, paid apps, and the eventual rebuild when you outgrow it, the real monthly cost often lands at or above a small TechTailors site that we build and maintain for you. Use the calculator above with your own numbers. -
Can I move my Wix or Squarespace site to another host?
Not really. Wix has no site export at all — the site runs on Wix's proprietary technology and stays there. Squarespace lets you export pages and posts as a basic WordPress file, but your design, store, and most content blocks don't transfer. TechTailors is the opposite: your accounts, content, and data are yours from day one and export freely anytime, and the code itself becomes a self-contained codebase you can host anywhere once you take the one-time buy-out. -
Why are website builders bad for SEO?
It's rarely one thing. Template sites tend to ship heavy, slow code, which hurts Core Web Vitals; you get limited control over technical SEO and structured data; and the generic markup makes you harder for both Google and AI answer engines to parse and cite. As of the 2024 Web Almanac, only about 40% of WordPress sites and 52% of Wix sites passed Core Web Vitals. We build technical SEO and AI-answer optimization into every site. -
Are Wix and Squarespace sites well-built under the hood?
They can be made decent by an expert, but the default output is generic and capped. You're choosing from a few thousand shared templates, the generated code is bloated, and you can't see into or refactor the architecture. The honest version: a builder is fine for a simple site, and frustrating the moment you need it to do something specific, fast, and yours. -
Is Webflow worth it for a business site?
Webflow is the most designer-friendly of the builders and can produce genuinely good-looking sites. The catch is ownership: the CMS is a higher tier, code export is a paid add-on that can't be reimported, and dynamic content and forms stop working once exported. You're renting a nicer apartment, but it's still a rental. -
What does a WordPress site really cost to run?
The WordPress software is free, which is where the “it's basically free” myth comes from. The real bill is hosting, a premium theme, premium plugins, and ongoing maintenance and security — realistically $25–$85/month for a small business site, plus your time. WordPress is genuinely portable, which is its biggest advantage; you just own all the upkeep. -
Do I own my website with TechTailors?
Yes, with one honest distinction. Every account in your stack (hosting, domain, CMS, store) is in your name from day one, so the day you leave you keep your accounts, content, and data, all free to export. The source code stays ours during the subscription, the same as Wix or Squarespace. The difference: there's a transparent, capped buy-out, and the moment you take it we run one script that hands you a self-contained codebase with zero dependency on us. See our Ownership and Offboarding policies.
How we sourced these numbers Show less
Pricing was pulled live on June 13, 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page and reflects the discounted annual-billing rate they show by default. Builder pricing and fees change often — if a number here looks off, check the source and let us know.
Vendor pricing & fees: Wix (opens in new tab), Squarespace (opens in new tab), Webflow (opens in new tab), WordPress.com (opens in new tab), GoDaddy (opens in new tab), and Shopify (opens in new tab). Accessibility figure: WebAIM Million 2026 (opens in new tab) (95.9% of one million home pages had detectable WCAG failures). Performance figures: 2024 Web Almanac (opens in new tab) Core Web Vitals pass rates by platform.
The calculator's plan tiers, billing terms, and first-party add-ons come from the same June 13, 2026 deep crawl. A few honest caveats baked in: Wix only shows its 2- and 3-year prices after you log in, so they're not in the picker; Wix HIPAA is bundled into Business and up, not a separate paid add-on; GoDaddy's rates are promotional first-term prices that renew higher (GoDaddy doesn't publish the renewal); and Shopify Email is usage-based (free to 10,000/mo), so it isn't a flat add-on. Third-party app-store plugins and domains are excluded by design.
One precision note, because it matters: the per-sale percentages above are the platform's extra cut, separate from normal card-processing fees that every host (including ours) charges. Wix's 4%/2%/0% figures are its “Pricing Plans” app fee, not card processing.
Stop renting your website
Tell us what your site needs to do. We'll show you the real monthly cost of owning it — built, maintained, and yours.
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