The Year-Two Price: What Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy Really Cost

You are picking a website builder, you have four browser tabs open, and every one of them shows a monthly price that looks fine. This is about the price that shows up later, the one that is not on the tab you have open right now. We looked at what Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, and WordPress.com actually charge over three years, not just the number on the signup page, so you can decide with the real math instead of the sticker.

One thing up front: we build garage door websites for a living, so we are not a neutral referee here. We checked every number below against the vendor’s own page where we could get to it, dated everything, and told you where a figure came from a third party instead. By the end you will know what each of these actually costs a garage door shop over three years, and where the number on the homepage stops being the number you pay.

The quick answer

None of these builders lied to you on the pricing page. They just showed you the smallest true number and let you assume it holds.

Squarespace raised its Core plan price up to 26 percent at renewal in July 2026, with no press release, discovered by customers in their inboxes. GoDaddy’s builder tiers jump 65 to 100 percent at renewal, roughly doubling on the mid-tier plan a garage door shop would actually pick. Wix does not publish what you pay past year one at all. WordPress.com is the most honest of the four about what its price actually includes, but the tier that behaves like a real business site is not the cheap one on the homepage.

Run the real three-year numbers, and a $1,497 flat-price built site (details below) lands in the same range as the DIY builders once you account for what they actually charge after year one, with none of the renewal surprises and none of the build-it-yourself hours. That does not make the builders a bad choice. It makes the sticker price the wrong number to shop on. The rest of this article shows the work.

The four costs that are not on the homepage

Every one of these plans is quoted at its cheapest possible number: the annual-billing rate, sometimes shown against a crossed-out “full price,” for a tier that may not even be the one you need. Four things routinely get left out of that number.

The renewal rate. Annual billing means you pay for the whole year up front at a promotional or list rate. What you pay in year two is a different number, and it is rarely on the same page as the one that got you to sign up.

The domain after year one. Wix, GoDaddy, and WordPress.com all bundle a free custom domain into paid annual plans for exactly one year. After that, the domain renews as its own charge, separate from the plan.

The plan tier you actually need. The cheap tier on the pricing page usually will not remove the platform’s branding, will not connect a real custom domain properly, or will not let you install the tools a working small-business site needs. The tier that does those things is further down the page and costs more.

The auto-renewal window. These are annual subscriptions. They renew on their own unless you cancel first, and the cancellation window is usually short and easy to miss during a busy season.

Three years, side by side

Here is what a garage door shop actually pays over 36 months for a real small-business plan, meaning the tier that removes the platform’s branding and supports a custom domain, prices checked 2026-08-28. Where the vendor’s own live page was reachable, we used it. Where it was not, we say so.

Option	Plan we compared	36-month total	Where it gets hard
Wix	Business, $39.77/mo annual (checked 2026-08-28)	~$1,432 at the current advertised rate	Nothing on the pricing page states what year two or three actually cost. No content export if you leave.
Squarespace	Core, $29/mo annual, post-increase (checked 2026-08-28)	~$1,044 at the current rate	Just rose up to 26 percent at renewal in July 2026 with no announcement, and 2025’s tier-name restructure landed on the same subscribers.
GoDaddy Website Builder	Premium, $14.99/mo intro, renews ~$29.99/mo (per third-party breakdown, checked 2026-08-28)	~$900 (intro year plus two renewal years)	The renewal rate is roughly double the price that sold you. Domain and builder often sit in one account, which complicates leaving later.
WordPress.com	Business, $25/mo annual (checked 2026-08-28)	~$900	Personal and Premium, the cheaper tiers, cannot install your own plugins. Business is the real floor for a working shop site.
Garage Door Websites, Essentials	$1,497 one-time (checked 2026-08-28)	$1,497 flat, no monthly plan fee	Flat price does not include ongoing edits. Website care is $149 a month, or $1,490 a year, and runs alongside either build. It covers maintenance, support, and updates.

A table like this only tells the truth if it shows where each option gets hard, not just what it costs. If a comparison only shows upside, somebody is selling you something.

Wix: no year-two number, no way out

Wix’s Business tier, the one most garage door shops would actually need to run online payments and remove Wix branding, runs $39.77 a month on annual billing as of this check. The free domain is bundled for one year, standard across nearly every builder on this list. What Wix does not publish anywhere on its own pricing page is what you pay when that first year renews.

Wix’s refund terms make the shape of the deal clear even without a published renewal number: the money-back guarantee is 14 days, and it applies only to your first payment, not to any renewal. Once you are past that window, or once you have auto-renewed, you are committed for the term you are in.

The other piece worth knowing before you build anything in Wix: there is no supported way to export a Wix site’s design or content to run somewhere else. If you build three years of pages, photos, and copy inside Wix and later decide you want an agency-built site instead, that is a rebuild from a blank page, not a migration. That is a real tradeoff for the ease of the drag-and-drop editor, not a scam, but it belongs in the decision.

Squarespace, and the July 2026 increase (the hard one)

Squarespace is the challenging one in this comparison, and it is worth saying why plainly. It is the most design-respected of these four builders, the one a garage door owner is least likely to feel embarrassed showing a customer. It is also the platform that just proved the whole “read the renewal fine print” warning is not theoretical.

In July 2026, Squarespace raised its Core plan from $23 to $29 a month on annual billing, a 26 percent increase, and its Plus plan by a comparable amount. The change was not announced in a press release. Customers found it in their renewal emails. This landed on top of a 2025 restructuring that retired Squarespace’s old Personal, Business, and Commerce tier names in favor of Basic, Core, Plus, and Advanced, which means some existing subscribers got the new tier structure and the price increase stacked into the same renewal notice.

None of that makes Squarespace a bad platform. Design quality is genuinely strong, and $29 a month is not an outrageous price for a small-business site. What it means is that any comparison article you read that was written before July 2026 is quoting numbers that are now wrong, including some of our own past posts if we have not caught up to this one yet. Pull the current number before you decide, and understand that “current” for a Squarespace subscriber can mean something different at your next renewal than it means today.

GoDaddy: the promo price is not the plan you’re actually buying

GoDaddy’s website builder is usually sold alongside the domain, which is convenient at signup and complicates things later. The published tiers run from a Basic plan around $9.99 a month up through Commerce, and on every tier the pattern is the same: the introductory 12-month price is roughly half of what the plan renews at. Premium, a reasonable tier for a working garage door shop site, runs about $14.99 a month to start and roughly $29.99 a month once it renews, per the third-party breakdown we cite above since GoDaddy’s own page did not load for this check.

The other thing worth watching with GoDaddy specifically is not the price, it is the account. When the domain and the builder both live inside one GoDaddy account, and that account gets set up by whoever built the site rather than the business owner, it becomes very easy for the owner to lose track of who actually holds the login. That is a separate risk from the renewal price, and it is the one we hear about most from shop owners who call us after a falling-out with whoever built their last site. If you go this route, make sure the account is registered to you, the business owner, from day one.

WordPress.com: the one that looks cheapest and usually is not

WordPress.com is the most transparent of the four about what its price includes, and it is also the one where the sticker most misleads a shopper because the cheap tiers are not the ones a real business site needs. Personal runs $4 a month annual, Premium runs $8. Neither one lets you install your own plugins, which means neither one can run a real contact form, a booking tool, or most of what a garage door shop actually needs a site to do. Business, at $25 a month annual, is the first tier that behaves like a small-business site. That is the honest comparison point, not the $4 number on the homepage.

The free-domain-first-year pattern holds here too, same as Wix and GoDaddy. What WordPress.com has going for it that the others do not: content built inside WordPress.com exports in the same standard format (WXR) that self-hosted WordPress uses, so if you outgrow the platform later, moving your posts and pages elsewhere is a real, documented path, not a full rebuild. That is worth something if you think you might want more control down the road.

The monthly-versus-annual trap runs both ways

Every one of these builders charges noticeably more if you pay monthly instead of committing to a year up front, sometimes 30 to 50 percent more on the same tier. That part is honest, and annual billing genuinely saves real money.

The trade you are making for that discount is your ability to walk away mid-year. Pay annually and decide in month four that the platform is not working, and you are either eating the rest of the year or fighting for a refund past the initial short window most of these vendors offer. Pay monthly and you keep the option to leave, at a real cost premium for keeping it. Neither choice is wrong. The mistake is picking annual billing because it is cheaper without deciding, honestly, whether you are the kind of shop that is going to want out in month four. If you are still weighing a DIY builder against a freelancer or a done-for-you build, our comparison of Wix, WordPress, and done-for-you options covers that decision in more depth.

What the built option costs, stated the same way

For comparison, here is our own pricing, checked against our pricing page on 2026-08-28. We are deliberately not turning it into a 36-month total, for the same reason we would not trust one from a builder: nobody actually knows how long you will keep the site. Some shops keep one for seven months and some keep one for ten years.

Option	Up-front build	Ongoing	What the ongoing covers
Garage Door Essentials	$1,497 once, up to 5 pages, 10 business days	$149 a month, or $1,490 a year	Maintenance, support, and the edits you ask for
Full Garage Door Website Rebuild	$4,500 once, up to 15 pages, 21 days	$149 a month, or $1,490 a year	The same, on a larger site

Website care comes with either build, so read it as part of the deal rather than an upsell you can decline. What it is not is a renewal cliff. The build is paid once, and the monthly is the same number in year two as it was in month one.

That is the entire comparison worth making against a builder. Not “ours is cheaper,” because over a long enough horizon a $19 builder plan is cheaper than anything with a person attached to it. The difference is that you can read our number in advance and it does not change on you at renewal.

When the builder still wins, honestly

There is a real shop where a DIY builder is the right money decision, and it is not the shop with six trucks and twelve city pages to maintain. It is the one-truck operation, maybe two, where the owner already has some comfort with a computer, has actual spare hours some weeks, and covers one county where everybody already knows them, with no stack of service-area pages to write.

For that shop, Wix Core or WordPress.com Business at roughly $900 to $1,100 over three years, paid in your own time instead of cash, can genuinely be the cheaper path. The honest catch, covered in more depth in our freelancer-versus-agency-versus-flat-rate cost breakdown, is that your hours have a price too, even when nobody invoices you for them. Twenty evenings spent fighting a template is a real cost. It just does not show up on the pricing page either.

What usually goes wrong

The two failure patterns we see most with DIY builders are not about the software being bad. They are about the parts of the decision that never made it onto the pricing page.

The first is the renewal surprise. A shop signs up at the promotional annual rate, forgets the exact date, and gets auto-renewed at a higher price with a cancellation window that already closed by the time the charge posts. This is exactly the pattern Squarespace’s July 2026 increase exposed at scale, and it is the same pattern GoDaddy’s intro-to-renewal jump produces every single year on a smaller scale, one shop at a time.

The second is confusing a cheap website with a cheap online presence. A $9.99-a-month plan gets a shop a live site, and the same promotional-pricing pattern shows up in the other tools a shop buys next, not just the website. Our sister brand’s breakdown of what CRM software actually costs a garage door company covers the same hidden-fee pattern in the systems that come after the website, seat minimums and onboarding charges included. Garage Door Lead Engine is our sister company and handles that side of the business, CRM and lead follow-up, a different decision from the one this article covers.

A cheap website that never turns a visitor into a phone call is not actually cheap, it is just cheap to look at. Our sister brand’s guide on why some leads convert and others do not covers what happens after somebody fills out your contact form, worth reading once the website itself is settled.

How to tell you got it right

You picked the right builder, or the right built option, if three things are true a year from now. You know exactly what your plan renews at and when, because you wrote it down or set a calendar reminder the day you signed up, not because you are trusting yourself to remember. You have not been surprised by a charge, a tier restriction, or a “you need to upgrade for that” wall you did not see coming. And the site itself is still doing its job, showing up when someone in your service area searches, loading fast on a phone, and making it obvious how to call you.

If any of those three is not true, that is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to look at what changed and decide, calmly, whether the fix is a setting, a plan upgrade, or a different platform entirely. Our built-site option is one path if the DIY route stops making sense for your shop, but it is not the only right answer, and it was not the right answer for every shop in this article either.