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The Real Cost of "Free" Website Builders

·Arcscribe Team
Small BusinessPricing
A pink piggy bank and a small brass key on a dark background
Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy aren’t free, and you don’t own what you build on them. What that actually costs a small business over time.

DIY website builders are marketed as free or nearly free. In practice, most small businesses end up paying a monthly fee indefinitely, for a site they don’t actually own.

The monthly fee never stops

A typical builder plan runs £15-£35 a month once you add a custom domain and remove the platform’s own branding. Over five years that’s £900-£2,100, for a website that’s still, technically, rented.

You don’t own it

Stop paying, and the site disappears. Want to move to a different developer or platform? In most cases you can’t take the design or the setup with you, you start again from scratch.

The one-off alternative

A one-pager built properly, from £99, or a full brochure site from £475, is a one-off cost. There’s no platform fee sitting underneath it, and it’s genuinely yours, not rented from a platform.

See the straight pricing on our small business websites page.

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