If you build your website on Squarespace, you have probably seen the renewal notice by now. Prices went up across the board in 2026, and for a lot of small businesses the new number lands as an unwelcome surprise. You are paying more, but you are getting the same thing you had before: a tool you still have to run yourself.
That is worth stopping on for a second. Because once you look at what a real Squarespace plan actually costs, and compare it to what a full-service studio charges, the math is closer than most people assume.
What Squarespace charges now
Squarespace splits its plans into four tiers. Billed annually, they run roughly:
- Basic: about $16 per month
- Core: about $23 per month
- Plus: about $39 per month
- Advanced: about $99 per month
Pay month to month instead of a year up front and every one of those numbers climbs. A business that needs scheduling, deeper commerce, or the automation tools most growing companies want ends up on Plus or Advanced, which is $468 to $1,188 a year. That is not a hobby-site price anymore. That is a real line item.
The cost the price tag hides
Here is the part the plan comparison never shows you: with Squarespace, the monthly fee only buys the software. Everything you do with it is still on you.
You design the pages. You write the copy. You resize the images, fix the mobile layout, wire up the forms, keep the content current, and troubleshoot it when something breaks the night before a deadline. The subscription is the easy part. The work is the expensive part, and it comes out of your time, which is the one thing a growing business has least of.
What we charge, and what "full service" actually means
RT7 Media is a Northern Virginia web studio. We design, build, host, and maintain websites as one service, from one accountable team. Our managed plans sit right in the same range as Squarespace's real-world pricing:
- Static Site: $300 a year, about $25 a month
- WordPress Essential: $600 a year, about $55 a month
- WordPress Plus: $900 a year, for heavier sites, commerce, and events
The difference is what happens after you sign up. We are not handing you a login and wishing you luck. Your site is built for you, hosted on servers we own and manage, backed up offsite every night, monitored, kept secure, and updated as part of the plan. When you need a change, you email us and it gets done. When something breaks, it is our problem to solve, not yours.
Same money, a very different deal
Put the two side by side and the choice gets clear. On Squarespace's Plus plan you pay around $468 a year for a tool you operate yourself. For $600 a year with us, you pay a little more and stop operating anything: the building, the hosting, the updates, and the support all come from one local team that answers the phone.
You are not really comparing prices. You are comparing a subscription against a service. One asks you to become your own web person. The other means you already have one.
Who this is for
If you enjoy building your own site and have the hours to keep it running, Squarespace is a fine tool and we will tell you so. But if you run a business in Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Reston, or anywhere across the DC metro, and your website is something you would rather have handled than manage, the new Squarespace pricing is a good reason to look at what full service actually costs. It is closer than you think, and it hands the work to someone else.