Squarespace Pricing 2026: Plans, Costs and Fees

Squarespace has four website plans in the US and they cost $25, $39, $65 and $139 a month, falling to $19, $29, $49 and $99 a month if you pay for a year up front. Those are Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, and every figure here was read from squarespace.com/pricing on September 2, 2026, including the region tagged pricing data the page publishes for the United States. The annual totals are $228, $348, $588 and $1,188.

The plan price is the easy part. What actually decides your Squarespace bill is three things the headline never mentions: the transaction fee on whatever you sell, the monthly AI credit allowance, and the seven features Basic does not have that most businesses discover they needed in week three. All three are laid out below with the published numbers.

Squarespace pricing in 2026: all four plans

Squarespace publishes both a monthly and an annual rate for every plan. The annual rate is quoted per month but charged as one payment for the year, so the third column is what actually leaves your account.

There is a fifth option, Squarespace Premium, aimed at scaling service businesses. It carries no published price and routes to a contact sales form, so we have no figure for it. The listed inclusions are a dedicated customer success manager, white glove migration, lower card processing rates, more AI credits, multi site control and enterprise security with SSO and SOC 2 Type II.

Is it cheaper to pay Squarespace annually?

Yes, by 24 to 29 percent depending on the plan. Squarespace's pricing page carries the line "Pay annually to save up to 36%". We could not reproduce 36 percent from the plan prices published on that same page. Here is the arithmetic on the published figures.

The largest discount we can calculate from published plan prices is 28.8 percent on Advanced. The 36 percent claim may include the value of the free domain year, or a promotional rate not shown in the price grid, or a different product line. We are flagging the gap rather than accusing anybody of anything, because the useful takeaway for a buyer is simple: budget on 24 to 29 percent, not 36, and the annual commitment is still clearly worth it if you are keeping the site for a year.

What is the difference between Squarespace Basic and Core?

This is the decision most people get wrong, because Basic looks like a $10 a month saving and is actually a different product. Read from the published feature matrix on September 2, 2026, Basic is missing all of the following, and Core has every one of them.

Code injection is the one that catches people. If you ever want to add a Google Analytics 4 tag, a Meta pixel, a chat widget or a booking script, that is code injection, and on Basic you cannot. Three separate no code marketing tasks all resolve to the same gated feature. If there is any chance you will run ads or install analytics beyond the built in metrics, Core is the floor, not the upgrade.

What are Squarespace transaction fees?

Squarespace charges a percentage on some of what you sell, and it varies by plan and by what you are selling. These are the published figures.

These sit on top of your payment processor's own card fees, which Squarespace does not absorb. The digital content line is the one worth doing arithmetic on before you pick a tier. If you sell $3,000 a month in courses or memberships, the fee difference between Core at 5 percent and Plus at 1 percent is $120 a month, which is more than the $20 a month the upgrade costs. At $1,000 a month it is $40 against a $20 upgrade, so Plus still wins. Below roughly $500 a month in digital sales, Core is cheaper. Physical product sellers have a simpler decision, because the store fee drops to zero at Core and never comes back.

How many AI credits does each Squarespace plan include?

Squarespace meters its AI features with credits, and the allowance is one of the clearest differences between the tiers: 10 credits one time on Basic, then 20, 40 and 120 credits per month on Core, Plus and Advanced. A separate feature called AI Visibility is metered the same way, at up to 10 prompt runs one time on Basic and up to 20, 40 and 120 prompt runs a month above it.

Credit metering is now the norm across this category rather than a Squarespace quirk. Hostinger includes 5 to 15 AI credits a month depending on plan. Butternut grants 100 credits a month on Starter and 300 on Pro. Durable meters by output, at 10 blog posts a month on Launch and 32 on Grow. The practical question to ask any vendor is what happens in the month you actually redesign the site, because that is the month you burn the allowance, and it is usually the month you are least willing to wait.

Does Squarespace include a free domain?

Yes, for one year, and only on an annual plan. Squarespace's FAQ states that purchasing an annual plan includes a free custom domain for one year, and that you can connect a domain you already own or buy one through Squarespace on any subscription. Hosting and SSL are included on every plan, monthly or annual.

The word doing the work in that sentence is "year". In year two the domain renews at the normal registry rate, which for a .com is usually in the $12 to $25 range depending on the registrar. That is a small number and nobody should panic about it, but it is worth understanding what a domain name is actually worth before you renew a name you no longer use, or let one lapse that somebody else has been quietly watching. Domains are the one asset in this stack that appreciates.

Is there a free Squarespace plan?

No. Squarespace states plainly that it does not offer a free plan, and that every site starts with a 14 day free trial with no credit card required. That is a shorter runway than it sounds. Two weeks is enough to evaluate the editor and not enough to write nine pages of copy, so most people either extend into a paid month or abandon a half finished trial site. If you are going to trial it, write the copy first and then use the trial to place it.

What Squarespace pricing does not include

Every price on this page buys you an empty, well designed container. The words are yours to write, and that is where the real cost of a website sits. US freelance rate charts published in 2026 put ghostwritten web and blog copy at roughly $0.25 to $0.42 a word, and the most commonly quoted project price for a single 1,500 word page is $250 to $399. A nine page small business site written by somebody else is therefore a $2,000 to $3,500 line item, which is between two and fifteen years of Squarespace depending on your plan.

Written by you, it is not free either. It is the reason so many Squarespace sites launch with three pages, a placeholder about section and a services list that has said "coming soon" since the spring. That is not a criticism of the software. Squarespace is a genuinely good editor. It is a statement about which task is the bottleneck, and the editor has never been it.

Squarespace pricing compared with the alternatives

Every figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page, on September 2, 2026 unless noted. First year cost assumes annual billing where the vendor offers it.

Two things are worth pulling out of that table. Squarespace is not the cheapest and never claims to be; it is priced as a design product and the templates justify it. And the entry prices at Hostinger and IONOS are introductory rates that multiply on renewal, by 3.3 to 4.3 times at Hostinger and twentyfold on the IONOS Plus plan, which is the single steepest cliff we have found in this category. Squarespace does not do that. Its renewal is its price, and after two years of reading vendor pricing pages that is worth saying out loud.

Which Squarespace plan should you actually buy?

Buy Core unless you have a specific reason not to. It is the first plan with code injection, so it is the first plan where you can install analytics, an ad pixel, a chat widget or a booking script, and almost every business needs at least one of those within a quarter. It has unlimited contributors, so a second person can help. It removes the 2 percent store fee. And the gap to Basic is $10 a month billed annually, which is less than the store fee costs you on $500 of monthly sales.

Buy Basic only if the site is genuinely a brochure: no store, no digital products, no analytics beyond the built in metrics, no second editor, and no scripts. That is a real situation and Basic serves it well at $228 a year.

Buy Plus when your digital content and membership revenue passes roughly $500 a month, because the fee drop from 5 percent to 1 percent pays for the tier. Buy Advanced when it passes roughly $2,500 a month, or when 50 hours of video hosting stops being enough.

Is Squarespace worth the price?

If you want to arrange pages yourself and you care how the result looks, yes. Squarespace's templates are the best defended reason to pay more than the hosting only players, and the annual price is honest in a way most of this category is not, because the number you pay in year three is the number you paid in year one. The reason to look elsewhere is not price, it is workload. You are still the copywriter, the information architect and the person deciding what belongs on the services page, and if that is what has kept your site unfinished, a cheaper editor will not fix it.

That is the trade an AI site agent makes. You describe the business in plain language and the agent designs it, writes every page, builds the navigation and internal links, sets the titles and meta descriptions and publishes on your domain, and you edit it by typing rather than by dragging. If you are weighing that route against a template builder, the honest side by side is on our website design software comparison, and the alternatives page for this specific vendor is our Squarespace alternative breakdown. If cost is what brought you here, the wider category numbers are in the small business website cost guide.

All Squarespace figures on this page were read from squarespace.com on September 2, 2026, including the United States region pricing data published in the page's own structured data. Prices change. Confirm on the vendor's page before you buy.