Ten years of Squarespace pricing.

I

The letter.

On 8 July 2026, Squarespace sent us an email with the subject line "Update to Your Squarespace Website Subscription Price." Beneath it was a list of every client site we manage on the platform — sixty-two of them — each with a new price beside it.

Fifty-three of those sites land on $348 a year. The tier they sit on had been $276. That is a 26.1% increase, arriving after four years of no change at all. The new prices take effect at each site's first renewal after 4 August 2026.

The email's explanation ran to one sentence:

"We periodically update our pricing to reflect continued investment in Squarespace. No action is needed to continue your subscription."

Squarespace, subscription price notice, 8 July 2026

No action is needed is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It is true in the narrow sense — you do not have to do anything, and you will be charged more. It is the sentence a company writes when it is confident you will not leave. That confidence is the actual subject of this article — and, as it happens, we are about to be an exception to it.

Our first reaction, reading it sixty-two times, was not analysis. It was: this is crazy. Working out whether that reaction was fair turned out to be a harder question than expected, and a more interesting one.

II

Ten years of the price.

The plan we care about is the middle one — the ordinary business website, no online store. Squarespace called it Business for most of the last decade and renamed it Core in the 2024/25 repackaging. Same slot, same customer, continuous history.

Here is what it has cost, every year since 2016.

The shape is the story. For six years — 2016 through 2021 — the price did not move at all. $216 a year, $18 a month, while everything else in the economy got more expensive. Then it moved twice: to $276 in March 2022, and to $348 this August.

On the estimates. Squarespace stopped publishing prices in its own page source in March 2016, so five of these cells — 2017, 2018, 2020, 2024 and 2025 — are carry-forward estimates between sourced snapshots, marked est. They are almost certainly flat: the years on either side of each are confirmed at the same price, and no price change was announced in them. We would rather label them than quietly smooth them.

III

Measured against inflation.

The fair test of a price increase is not whether the number went up. It is whether the number went up faster than money lost value. So we took the 2016 price and escalated it by nothing but CPI-U — the Bureau of Labor Statistics' headline inflation index — and compared.

$216 in 2016 is $301 in today's money. Squarespace is charging $348. The difference — about $47 per site, per year — is the part inflation does not explain.

• +61.1% Squarespace's price, 2016 → 2026
• +39.1% US inflation over the same decade
• +15.8% The real increase, once inflation is stripped out

Compounded, Squarespace's price has grown at 4.9% a year against inflation's 3.4%. Over ten years that opens a gap of 22 percentage points.

But the honest version is more interesting than "they gouged you"

Look again at where the lines sit before 2022. For six years Squarespace charged less than inflation would have justified — by 2021, the $216 price was worth about 11% less in real terms than when they set it. Every year they left it alone, they quietly took a real-terms pay cut. Customers who joined in that window got a genuine bargain, and nobody wrote an article about it.

What happened next is that Squarespace took it all back, and then some, in two lumps. That is a different accusation from ten years of gouging, and a milder one. But it is not nothing: the company is now 15.8% ahead of inflation in real terms, and it got there by holding still and then jumping — which is the least predictable way to do it, and the hardest one to budget around.

IV

What everyone else charges.

A price increase can still be a good deal if the thing is underpriced. So: what does a comparable business website — no online store — cost everywhere else, on annual billing, right now?

The answer is that Squarespace is no longer underpriced. After August it sits level with the most expensive comparable plans on the market — Wix Core, Duda Team — and at two to three times what Webflow, Wix's entry tier, or WordPress.com will charge you for a site a small business would find perfectly adequate.

It is not alone in raising prices. Shopify put its Basic plan up 34% in 2023. Wix has moved its Business tier up 22% since 2024. Duda raised per-site pricing 17% in 2024. Price rises are the weather in this category, not a Squarespace peculiarity.

But one number is worth sitting with. In May 2026, Webflow restructured its plans and cut the equivalent tier by roughly a third. In the same season, Squarespace went up 26%. Both companies are looking at the same market and the same AI-site-builder pressure, and they have drawn opposite conclusions about what a business website is worth.

V

Why now.

Squarespace's own answer is "continued investment in Squarespace." Its help documentation puts it slightly differently — the plans are updated "to support the significant improvements we continue to make to the Squarespace platform." Both are true and neither is an explanation. Here is what else was going on.

The company told its investors that raising prices is the plan

When Squarespace was publicly traded it had to explain its revenue growth to the SEC, and it did so plainly. From the 2023 annual report: price increases on website plans "contributed $34.3 million, or 32.1%, to the year-over-year presence revenue growth." Roughly a third of that year's growth in website revenue came not from new customers, but from charging existing ones more.

There is a smaller detail we find more telling. Squarespace reports a metric called ARPUS — average revenue per subscription. In its 2023 annual report, it described ARPUS as a measure of its ability to "sell higher-value plans and add-on subscriptions." In its final quarterly filing before going private, that sentence had gained two words:

"…our ability to increase prices, sell higher-value plans and add-on subscriptions."

Squarespace 10-Q, Q2 2024 — the last one it ever filed

Then it was bought with borrowed money

In October 2024 the private-equity firm Permira completed its purchase of Squarespace, taking it off the public market in a deal worth about $6.9 billion. The purchase was financed in part with a $2.1 billion term loan at a floating rate — SOFR plus 500 basis points. Floating means the interest bill moves with rates, and it has to be paid out of cash the business generates.

In a subscription business, the fastest lever on cash is price.

We want to be careful here, because it would be easy to overclaim. No journalist has reported that Permira ordered these increases, and we have not found evidence that they did. Squarespace was raising prices on existing customers from mid-2022 — two years before the buyout — and its own CFO said so on an earnings call. The price lever was already installed. What changed in 2024 is who is holding it, and how much debt is riding on it.

And the exits were closed on the way

The sequence is tidier than it looks. The buyout closes in October 2024. A new price book arrives, on which the top commerce tier costs 90% more than the plan it replaced. Legacy plans are closed to new signups in early 2026. And this August, the customers still sitting on legacy prices — us, and the sixty-two sites — are moved onto the new book.

Squarespace's help pages confirm who this month's letter was aimed at: "If you received an email about your subscription price changing, the site listed in that email is on a legacy website plan." The same pages note that the move is one-way — "it's not possible to return to a legacy plan" once you leave it. Four steps, in order, each one narrowing the room to stand still.

VI

What to actually do.

We manage 62 of these sites, so we had to answer this for ourselves. The honest conclusion is that the options are thinner than you would hope.

The agency discount is worth nothing here

Squarespace runs a partner programme called Circle, which gives designers and agencies up to 20–25% off. It does not help. Circle's discount applies to a site's first payment only — Squarespace's own documentation says it "doesn't apply to future renewals, reactivations, or plan changes" — and points are earned by launching new sites, not by keeping existing ones alive.

• $0 What Circle saves on a renewal, at any tier
• None Volume discount, reseller tier, or multi-site plan
• 62 × 1 Our sites are billed as 62 unrelated retail subscriptions

That last one is the structural fact of this whole piece. An agency bringing Squarespace sixty-two paying subscriptions is billed exactly as if it were sixty-two strangers. There is no volume tier to negotiate, because there is no volume tier. Circle is a customer-acquisition subsidy dressed as a loyalty programme: it pays you to bring Squarespace new business, and it pays you nothing for the business you already brought.

Timing is the only lever you own

The increase applies at each site's first renewal after 4 August 2026. A site that renews before that date banks another twelve months at the old price. If you have sites renewing in late July, that is worth knowing this week rather than next.

Whether Squarespace will let you force an early annual renewal to reset the clock, we genuinely do not know — we have not found a documented answer either way, and we would not want to state one we have not confirmed. It is a five-minute question for their support team, and for a portfolio our size the answer is worth about four thousand dollars. We are asking.

And the real question underneath

For most single-site owners, $29 a month for a hosted, maintained, secure website that you can edit yourself is not a scandal. It is roughly what everyone charges, and it is less than an hour of a developer's time. If Squarespace genuinely earns its keep for you — if you are in there weekly, running commerce, scheduling, member areas — the rational move is to pay the $348 and get on with your business.

But the calculation changes with scale, and it changes with what you actually use. Some of our sixty-two are brochure sites — a church, a contractor — edited twice a year, now paying the ceiling price of the market for the floor tier of the product. A fair number are the opposite: owners who are in their site every week, updating menus, events, photos, prices. Squarespace would say the second group is exactly who the subscription is for. Our experience this year says they have the most to gain from leaving — the more often a site changes, the more all those clicks cost, and the more it matters that an update can simply be sent in and made.

So here is what we are actually doing

We should be honest about the order things happened in. Our first reaction to the letter was not analytical. It was: they just raised prices again — this is crazy. The research above talked us down from that; the increase, taken on its own, is defensible. What the research could not talk us out of is something that had already happened months before the letter arrived.

We have been building sites with AI since February, and it has made working in Squarespace feel archaic. That is not a small thing for us to say — Squarespace was our favourite platform for years, and we are the ones who brought it these sixty-two subscriptions. But editing a Squarespace site now means clicks: find the page, find the block, open the panel, make the change, hope the layout holds. With an AI-built site, you feed in the update and it is made — across every page it touches, in one pass. Building this way is so much easier, faster, and more powerful that we now wince a little every time we have to open the Squarespace editor at all.

So for most of these sixty-two sites, we will be recommending that our clients convert off Squarespace entirely — onto hand-coded sites we build with AI and then run for them. Same content, rebuilt as clean, fast code, tuned for search and for AI answers. No content-management system left to rent, because there is nothing for the owner to operate: you email us; it gets changed. The renewal letter stops arriving. Given the choice, we would take everybody off Squarespace — the price increase just moved the conversation up the calendar.

Squarespace priced this decade on the bet that leaving is more trouble than $72 a year. For a decade that bet was correct — rebuilds cost thousands of dollars of a developer's time, so nobody moved a working site over a price letter. AI is what changed the arithmetic. The build cost collapsed; the exit stopped being theoretical. That, more than any one renewal notice, is the finding of this article.

VII

Method & sources.

Prices. The 2026 figures come from the price notice we received on 8 July 2026 and from Squarespace's live pricing page, which agree exactly. Historical prices come from archived copies of Squarespace's own pricing page (2016) and from contemporaneous third-party pricing reviews captured by the Internet Archive (2019, 2021, 2022, 2023). Squarespace removed prices from its page source in March 2016, which is why the middle of the decade has to be sourced second-hand. The five estimated cells are marked in Table 1.

Inflation. CPI-U, all items, US city average, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics public API (series CUUR0000SA0). We compare the 2016 annual average (240.007) with the most recent monthly reading available at the time of writing, June 2026 (333.952) — a cumulative 39.1%. All percentage comparisons use a matched ten-year basis.

Financials. Revenue, ARPUS and the quoted language come from Squarespace's SEC filings — the FY2023 annual report and the Q2 2024 quarterly report, its last as a public company. Deal terms and the debt package come from Permira's announcements and contemporaneous reporting on the financing.

What we did not verify. We found no reporting that links Permira's ownership to these specific increases, and we have not asserted one — the debt and the increase are both facts, and we have left them next to each other. We have not confirmed whether an early renewal can be forced to lock the old rate. Competitor plan definitions differ, and a like-for-like comparison of website builders is always a little bit of a judgement call; we have named the exact plan behind every bar so you can check ours.

1. Squarespace, "Update to Your Squarespace Website Subscription Price" — email notice, 8 July 2026 (in our possession).
2. Squarespace pricing · Legacy website billing plans · Circle discount & benefits
3. Squarespace Inc., Form 10-K, FY2023 and Form 10-Q, Q2 2024.
4. Permira, completion of the Squarespace acquisition, 17 October 2024.
5. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, series CUUR0000SA0.
6. Vendor pricing pages for Wix, Webflow, WordPress.com and Duda, retrieved July 2026; Webflow's 2026 repricing; Shopify's 2023 increase.