"Build a free website in minutes."
You've seen the ads. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and a dozen other platforms promise you a professional website for nothing. Pick a template, drag in your content, and you're live.
It sounds great. And for a personal blog or a hobby project, it might be fine. But for a business that depends on its website to generate customers? The math tells a different story.
The "Free" Tier Isn't Usable for Business
Every platform offers a free plan. Here's what the free plan actually gives you:
- Their branding on your site. "Made with Wix" or "Powered by Squarespace" in the footer. This immediately signals to visitors that you didn't invest in your business.
- A subdomain, not your own URL. Your site address is something like yourname.wixsite.com. Not yourcompany.com. This hurts credibility and makes it nearly impossible to rank on Google for local searches.
- No e-commerce. Can't sell anything.
- Limited storage and bandwidth. Fine for a few pages. Not fine when you add project photos, menus, or portfolios.
- Ads. Some platforms show their ads on your free site.
To get a usable business website, you need a paid plan. Which means it was never free.
The Real Monthly Cost
Let's look at what a "DIY" business website actually costs once you move past the free tier:
Platform subscription: $16 to $45/month. That's $192 to $540 per year. Over 3 years, that's $576 to $1,620 just for the platform.
Custom domain: $12 to $20/year. Some plans include it for the first year, then charge. Others don't include it at all.
Premium templates: $0 to $200 one-time. The free templates look free. Many businesses end up buying a premium one.
Third-party apps and integrations: $0 to $50+/month. Need online scheduling? That's an app. Need advanced forms? App. Need better SEO tools? App. These add up fast.
Your time: priceless (and expensive). This is the cost nobody calculates. How many hours will you spend learning the platform, fighting with the template, tweaking the layout, and troubleshooting issues? Your time has a dollar value. If you bill $75/hour and spend 40 hours building and maintaining your site over a year, that's $3,000 in time you could have spent running your business.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions
Beyond the subscription, there are costs that only become apparent after you're committed:
Speed. DIY builders load a lot of code - their framework, their tracking, their template engine - all on top of your content. Most builder sites score poorly on Google PageSpeed, which hurts your search rankings. You can't fix this because you don't control the platform's code.
SEO limitations. These platforms give you basic SEO fields (titles and descriptions), but you often can't add structured data, customize your site's technical architecture, or control how pages are crawled. For local businesses trying to rank in specific Michigan cities, this is a significant disadvantage.
Design ceilings. Templates look great on the demo page because they use professional photography and carefully crafted content. When you swap in your own content, the limitations become apparent. Every customization is a workaround. You can't break out of the template's structure.
Platform lock-in. This is the big one. When you build on Wix, your site exists on Wix. You can't export it and move to another host. You can't hire a developer to optimize it independently. If Wix raises prices, changes features, or goes down, you have no options except to start over somewhere else.
Compare that to a custom site you own: you can move it to any host, any developer can work on it, and you control everything.
No ownership. You're renting, not owning. You don't possess your website's code. You have content, but the site itself belongs to the platform. Cancel your subscription and your website disappears.
The 3-Year Cost Comparison
Let's do the real math for a small service business:
DIY Builder Route (3 years):
- Platform: $35/month x 36 months = $1,260
- Domain: $15/year x 3 = $45
- Premium template: $100
- Apps/plugins: $15/month x 36 = $540
- Your time building: 30 hours x $75 = $2,250
- Your time maintaining: 5 hours/year x 3 x $75 = $1,125
- Total: approximately $5,320
Custom Website Route (3 years):
- Custom design and build: $5,000 to $8,000
- Hosting: $50/month x 36 = $1,800
- Domain: $15/year x 3 = $45
- Maintenance: included in hosting or $50/month
- Your time maintaining: minimal (CMS is built for you)
- Total: approximately $7,000 to $10,000
The custom route costs more, but look at what you get: a faster site that ranks better on Google, a design that's unique to your business, full ownership, no platform lock-in, and dramatically less of your time spent wrestling with technology.
For a business where the website generates leads, the better site pays for itself with just a few extra customers per year.
When a Builder Actually Makes Sense
I'm being honest here, so let's cover this too. A DIY builder is reasonable if:
- You're testing a business idea and need something online this week
- You have genuinely zero budget (not "I'd rather not spend money," but actually zero)
- Your website is purely informational and you don't depend on it for leads
- You enjoy building websites and consider the time a hobby, not a cost
If your business is established, you depend on your website for customers, and you're in a competitive local market, the math almost always favors investing in a real site.
The Question to Ask Yourself
If a potential customer in Howell searches for what you do and finds two businesses - one with a polished, fast, custom website and another with a Squarespace template that looks like three other businesses on the same page - who do they call?
Your website is often the first impression someone has of your business. The question isn't whether you can afford a professional website. It's whether you can afford not to have one.
Ready to stop renting and start owning? Let's talk about what a custom website would look like for your business.