Website Builder Price Rises 2024–2026: The Pattern Nobody Talks About
Shopify raised its prices 33% in one hit and told you about it. Squarespace and Wix didn't raise the sticker price — they renamed the plans instead. Same bill, no warning.
In January 2023, Shopify raised its plan prices in one move: Basic from US$29 to US$39 a month, its mid-tier plan from US$79 to US$105, Advanced from US$299 to US$399. Roughly a third more, applied to every merchant on a fixed date, reported at the time as Shopify's first pricing update in years. A one-third increase, on the record, with a date attached.
That's the honest version of what's happening to every rented website platform right now. It's also the least interesting version, because Shopify told you. Squarespace and Wix didn't need to make an announcement. They just moved the furniture around, and the bill went up anyway.
The transparent rise, and what happened after it
Shopify's 2023 increase is useful because it's the one number in this whole category that's actually documented — a real date, a real percentage, reported by outlets that cover the platform closely. It's worth sitting with for a second: a business running Shopify's mid-tier plan went from paying US$948 a year to US$1,260 a year, for the same store, overnight.
What's less documented is what happened to that plan's name since. Shopify's current pricing page lists Basic at A$56/month, a mid-tier plan called Grow at A$149/month, and Advanced at A$575/month (annual billing knocks those down to A$42, A$114 and A$431). The plan that cost US$105 a month after the 2023 rise sits in the same position in the line-up today — cheapest paid plan, mid-tier, top tier — but it isn't called "Shopify" anymore. It's called Grow.
Maybe that's a coincidence of marketing. Maybe it's a genuinely different product. But it's a pattern worth noticing, because Squarespace and Wix have been doing a version of it for longer, and with less of a paper trail.
The quiet version: renamed tiers, not raised prices
Squarespace's own help centre still lists features by two overlapping plan families in the same sentence. One support article on code blocks says JavaScript and iframes are available "in the Core, Plus, Advanced, Business, Commerce Basic, and Commerce Advanced plans" — six names for what functions as three or four tiers, because Business, Commerce Basic and Commerce Advanced are the old names some customers are still grandfathered into, and Core, Plus and Advanced are what everyone signing up today gets sold instead.
If you built a spreadsheet in 2023 tracking "what does Squarespace's mid-tier plan cost," you'd have needed to rebuild it once the mid-tier plan stopped existing under that name. That's not an accusation — plan restructures happen for real product reasons too — but it's also exactly the kind of change that makes a clean "prices went up X% since 2024" headline impossible to write honestly. You can't compare a price to a product that no longer has the same name, the same feature set, or in some cases the same storage and bandwidth limits.
The bigger structural fact sits underneath the renaming. In May 2024, Squarespace signed a deal to go private, taken over by the private equity firm Permira for roughly US$6.9 billion, a figure Permira raised to US$7.2 billion before the deal closed in October 2024. Public subscription businesses answer to quarterly earnings calls; private-equity-owned ones answer to a return schedule set at the point of acquisition. Neither structure is villainous, but only one of them has a standing incentive to grow average revenue per subscriber inside the same customer base — through price, through upsells, or through repackaging what used to be one plan into two.
Wix hasn't gone private, but its numbers tell a similar story from the revenue side. Wix's own reported figures show revenue climbing from roughly US$989 million in 2020 to US$1.76 billion in 2024, with net income of US$138 million that year. Over the same period its user base grew from tens of millions to over 260 million — but the overwhelming majority of those users sit on Wix's free tier, which earns the company nothing directly. Revenue growing 78% over four years off a mostly-free user base has to come from somewhere, and "somewhere" is a shrinking pool of paying subscribers being asked to carry more of the load each year.
None of this is a scandal. It's how every venture-scale SaaS platform is built to work. It's just rarely explained to the small business owner who signed up for a $19-a-month plan three years ago and can't quite work out why the renewal notice says something else.
What the same three platforms cost right now
Here's where things actually sit in August 2026, as published on each platform's own site or independently reviewed within the last few months:
Add a real theme (many "free" Squarespace and Wix templates are limited; the ones that look genuinely custom often carry a one-off licence fee), a booking or membership app, an email platform integration, and the effective monthly cost on any of these three lands well above the headline number — usually $80–$180 a month once a real small business is actually running on the plan, not just parked on it.
Subscription drift is the real story, not the percentage
The specific number matters less than the shape of the pattern. A rented platform can change what you pay in three ways: raise the sticker price (Shopify, documented, 2023), rename and repackage the tiers (Squarespace, evidenced by its own support docs), or grow revenue off a shrinking paying base while the free tier absorbs new sign-ups (Wix, evidenced by its own reported financials). All three routes get you to the same place — a bill five years from now that's higher than the one you budgeted for, on a website you never owned in the first place.
We ran the full five-year math on this in detail in Squarespace vs a custom-coded build — at the low end, five years of a properly run Squarespace site with add-ons lands around $6,700–$14,700, against $8,100–$17,240 for a one-off custom build with near-zero recurring cost after year one. The gap in raw dollars is closer than people expect. What isn't close is exposure: the subscription path has no ceiling on it, because you don't control the pricing team. A custom-coded build doesn't have that problem, because after the invoice clears, there's no landlord left to raise the rent.
When the subscription is still the right call
None of this means every business should walk away from Squarespace, Wix or Shopify tomorrow. If you're validating an idea, running on a genuinely tight budget, or your site is a small piece of a business that lives on referrals and foot traffic, a $29-a-month plan is still the correct tool. The maths in this piece matters most for businesses where the website is doing real commercial work — generating enquiries, taking bookings, selling product — because that's where a rising, unpredictable line item compounds against you every year you stay on it.
Before you renew
If your business has been on the same platform for three-plus years, pull up the actual invoice history rather than the current pricing page. Compare what you paid in year one to what you're paying now, on the plan you're actually on — not the plan the marketing page currently advertises as equivalent. Most owners who do this are surprised by the gap, and more surprised by how hard the platform made it to see.
If the number's bigger than you expected and you want to know what a website that doesn't get a renewal notice would actually cost for your business, book a 20-minute call. No deck, no pressure — just the real numbers for your situation, the same way we've laid them out here. You can also call 0421 933 907 directly if that's easier.