Squarespace vs a custom site: when it is worth leaving
If you are choosing between Squarespace and a custom site, start on Squarespace. A subscription and some of your own time puts a real business online with a domain, a contact form and a payment button, and the cheapest thing we build, step 01, is EUR 600-900 for a single page. Paying a studio before you know what the site has to do buys you a polished version of a guess.
That is the honest order. Squarespace is a good product with real design work behind it, and it stops being the right answer for three specific reasons. Until one of them is yours, switching is spending money to arrive in the same place.
What Squarespace is genuinely good at
It removes the decisions you do not want to make. Hosting, certificates, image sizes, a mobile layout that holds together, a template someone competent designed, an editor a colleague can use. You pay monthly and the platform stays responsible for the site being up, which is a real thing to buy.
It is also reversible in a way a build is not. If the business changes shape, you restyle the site and carry on. A site we build is a commitment to the shape you chose. That is fine once the shape has stopped moving, and expensive while it is still moving.
Three reasons to leave
1. The site has to do something the builder does not do
A customer login. A client area with documents behind it. Booking that reads your real availability instead of an embedded calendar. A dashboard. Payments with your own rules about who pays what and what happens afterwards. A connection into the system you already run the business on. A builder is a fixed set of blocks, and this is the point at which the block you need does not exist. That work is step 04, advanced site or web app, EUR 3.500-7.500, over 6 to 12 weeks.
2. You cannot reach the part that is wrong
On a builder you control what goes into the editor. Something else decides the HTML that comes out. When a page is heavy, or a report names a problem in the markup, or you want one section to arrive before the rest, you can change your content, and custom code only reaches so far into what the platform generates. On a build, the output is a file in your own repository, so a fix is an edit. That difference is what design and engineering in the same hands actually buys you.
3. The template starts costing you the sale
Templates are made to fit any business, which means they fit yours approximately. You write to the slots the layout offers rather than the order you actually sell in. The objection you always have to answer ends up at the bottom because there is nowhere to put it, the price table has the wrong number of columns, the case study becomes a blog post. It is a small tax at first and it grows as the site carries more of the selling.
One thing that is not on that list is ownership. When we build, the client owns the code, the repository and the database, and we can host it too, agreed per project.
What each option costs
| What the site has to do | Squarespace | Built for you |
|---|---|---|
| One page, a form, analytics | A good fit | Step 01, EUR 600-900, 1-2 weeks |
| Two or three pages, a contact flow, light editing | A good fit | Step 02, EUR 900-1.500, 2-3 weeks |
| Four to seven pages, service pages, a CMS your team edits, booking or contact | Workable inside the template | Step 03, EUR 1.500-3.500, 3-6 weeks |
| Login, dashboard, API, CRM, payments, chatbot | Not this | Step 04, EUR 3.500-7.500, 6-12 weeks |
| Your own product with accounts, billing and an admin | Not this | Step 05, from EUR 7.500, after discovery |
The full ladder, with what is included at each step, is on packages. A build is a fixed price for a defined thing and a builder is a subscription that keeps arriving, so the comparison is not really price against price. After launch, Care is optional at EUR 100-300 a month and covers updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It is not a redesign and it does not cover new features. SEO foundation is a separate one-off of EUR 450-750, covering Search Console and analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles and internal links.
How a build runs
We go through what the site has to do, then quote. A fixed quote always follows scoping, because a number given before anyone has looked at the work is either padded or wrong. Then design, then build, then content, then launch. Step 01 runs 1 to 2 weeks, step 02 runs 2 to 3, step 03 runs 3 to 6, step 04 runs 6 to 12.
Inside those weeks, the design and the code are ours to keep moving. Content is the part that waits on you: the service descriptions, the photographs, the answer to what makes you different from the other names on the same result page. If you want the short end of a range, have that written before we start.
When to stay where you are
If the site is one page of information and a phone number, and the phone rings, there is nothing here for you to buy. If you have not sold the thing yet, a builder plus the same money spent on getting in front of people will teach you more than a build will. If the only complaint is that it looks dated, a better template and a photographer will move that further than we will at the same price. If the problem is that nobody finds the site, a rebuild does not fix that either, and the SEO foundation can be done on a Squarespace site, within what the builder lets you change.
Those are four situations, and in all four the right answer is to not buy a build yet. Come back when the site has to do something it cannot do.
Common questions
Can you move my site off Squarespace without losing my search traffic?
Keep the same URLs wherever the page still exists, redirect the ones that have to change, and carry the text across rather than rewriting everything in the same week. Changing platform, renaming every page and rewriting the copy at once is the version that goes wrong, because nothing that moves afterwards can be traced to a cause. The redirect map is planned during the build, not bolted on at launch.
Will I be paying you every month?
Only if you want Care, at EUR 100-300 a month for updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It is optional and it is not a condition of the build. You will still pay for a domain and for hosting somewhere, and we can host, agreed per project.
Can I still edit my own pages?
Yes. A CMS is in from step 02 upward, set up around the things that actually change: text, prices, images, posts, a new service page. Structural changes are still a job for us, in the same way that moving a wall is not a paint job.
What happens to the site if we stop working together?
You keep it. The code, the repository and the database are yours, so another developer can pick it up without asking us for permission or for an export. A builder cannot offer that, because what you hold there is access to a product.
Is a custom site always better?
No. It is better when the site has work a template cannot do, and worse when it does not, because you paid more for the same result and took on responsibility for keeping it alive. The useful question is whether what you need has crossed from step 02 into step 03, or from step 03 into step 04.
If one of the three reasons is yours, tell us what the site has to do and we will scope it and come back with a fixed price.
Building something?
JP Studio designs and builds websites, storefronts and product interfaces.