Why we switched £600 of Wix subscriptions for one £499 same-day site
A Bermondsey restaurateur did the maths on year-three Wix renewals vs a one-off custom site. The numbers were not close.
Most UK small businesses pick Wix or Squarespace because the upfront price looks cheap. Then the renewals come. We see the bills every week — a restaurateur in Bermondsey did the full maths in front of us, and the gap was not close.
The £600 number
A typical Wix Business plan in the UK costs around £25 / month at the annual rate (more if you pay month-to-month), plus £14 / month for the email plan, plus the domain renewal at £14 / year, plus the apps that come bundled at "free" but flip to £8–£15 / month after the first year. Add it up across 36 months and a single restaurant pays around £1,500–£1,800 — and they still don't own the underlying site.
What we delivered for £499 once
A bespoke restaurant website with menu pages, table booking via Resy, contact form, schema markup for the local pack, GA4 wired, and 12 months of UK hosting. The owner kept the domain and the source files.
The kicker
Three years in, the same site is still live, still ranking, still taking bookings. The Wix subscription would have cost roughly four times as much by then — for a site nobody owns.
The three-year ledger, line by line
When we sat down with the owner we pulled both invoices side-by-side. The Wix column read: Business plan at £25 × 36 = £900; Wix email at £14 × 36 = £504; domain renewal £14 × 3 = £42; the Smile.io loyalty app at £12 × 24 (free year one) = £288; the Visitor Analytics Pro at £9 × 24 = £216; the Bookings app upgrade at £8 × 24 = £192. Total: £2,142 over three years. The custom column read: £499 build, £180 for year-two hosting renewal, £180 for year-three hosting renewal, £14 × 3 domain. Total: £901. Same trading period, less than half the spend, and the second column ends with a site the owner can move, sell, hand to a developer, or rebuild on a different stack without permission from anyone.
What "ownership" actually means when the renewal lapses
The piece nobody warns you about: when a Wix subscription expires, the site goes offline. The content sits in their database — locked behind a paywall — and there is no clean export. You cannot zip your site, point a new host at it and walk away. The HTML, CSS and JavaScript Wix generates is bound to their runtime; it relies on their CDN, their image transformer, their booking widget, their checkout. If you stop paying, the site stops working. We have migrated 40+ businesses off Wix and Squarespace in the last 18 months and every single one had to be rebuilt — not exported, rebuilt — because the platform output is not portable.
The apps trap
Wix's editor is genuinely friendly, but the marketplace is where the real revenue lives. The eight apps small-business owners install most often (Wix Bookings Pro, Wix Stores upgrades, Visitor Analytics, Smile.io, Klaviyo, Wix Forms Pro, Hotjar Lite, Wix Multilingual) average £74 / month combined. A custom build bundles equivalents into the source code at no marginal cost: a typed appointment form, a privacy-friendly counter, a Stripe-native checkout, a Klaviyo or Resend email handoff. None of them charge you to keep them switched on.
Cashflow: why "subscription" is the wrong model for a brochure site
Subscriptions make sense when the product genuinely improves over time and your usage scales with revenue (SaaS, hosting, transactional email). A brochure-ware website is the opposite — it does its job whether you log in or not. Paying £40 / month forever for a five-page site is the equivalent of leasing a kettle. Most owners do not notice because the direct debit is small. They notice in year three when they look at the bank statement and realise the website has cost £1,800 and the only thing they have ever changed is the opening hours.
The migration, end-to-end
When a client moves to us we run the same six-step sequence every time: full Screaming Frog crawl of the old Wix site (every URL, every meta title, every H1), Search Console export of the top 1,000 queries and pages over the previous 16 months, 1:1 redirect map written into the new host's redirects.json, schema entities preserved by @id where possible, the new build shipped with the existing copy intact for week one, then a copy refresh in week three. Average organic traffic delta at day 30: -2% to +4%. Most clients gain traffic because we fix the Wix render-blocking JS that Lighthouse has been complaining about for years.
What our £499 actually includes
Plain English line items: a custom design (not a template), up to six pages, mobile-first build with Core Web Vitals tuned, on-page SEO (titles, meta, schema, alt text, internal links), a Stripe-ready contact or booking form, GA4 plus a cookie banner, a 301 redirect map if you are migrating, sitemap and robots.txt, 12 months of UK hosting, and the source files in a git repository you own. Same-day delivery if briefed by noon UK. There is no upsell list and no surprise renewal — the only ongoing cost is hosting at £15 / month from year two onwards, and you can move that to any UK host (Vercel, Netlify, Hetzner) without rebuilding.
Does Wix Studio change the maths?
Wix's newer agency-tier product (Wix Studio) is a meaningfully better builder than the classic editor — closer to Webflow than to drag-and-drop. The price reflects that: Studio Business sits around £29 / month at the annual rate, with the same email and app stack on top. Studio output is still not portable, the marketplace economics are the same, and the schema generated is still fragile (we have seen Studio sites ship LocalBusiness schema with the wrong @type nested at the root). For an agency shipping ten sites a month it is a defensible tool. For a single small business it is the same trap with a smarter interface.
Two scenarios where Wix is still the right call
First: you genuinely cannot brief a developer because you do not yet know what the business does. Wix's editor lets you iterate the offering in public for a year, cheaply, and that is sometimes the right move. Second: you actively enjoy fiddling with the design every weekend. A static custom build will sit there exactly as we shipped it; if your hobby is rearranging the homepage, Wix is happier ground. For everyone else — anyone who wants the site to exist, work, rank, convert, and stop demanding attention — the maths breaks at month 22.
Common objections we hear
"We already have a Wix site with three years of content" — we migrate the content; URLs and rankings stay intact because the redirect map preserves them. "The Wix editor is easier than a developer" — true on day one, untrue on day 400 when you cannot find the setting that's breaking your mobile checkout. "Custom builds get out of date" — they do not, in the same way a brick wall does not. The HTML, CSS and JavaScript shipped in 2026 will render correctly in 2030; the platform is the web, not a vendor. "What if you go out of business?" — the site is on your hosting account, in a git repo you own; any developer can pick it up tomorrow.
A three-question decision test
If you can answer yes to all three, you should be on a custom build, not Wix: (1) Do you know within one sentence what your business does and who it sells to? (2) Will you happily leave the website alone for ten months at a time once it ships? (3) Is the website expected to generate or protect revenue greater than £6,000 / year? If any answer is no, stay on Wix for now. If all three are yes, every month you wait on Wix is roughly £30 lit on fire and a small E-E-A-T deficit accruing in Google's eyes.
When Wix is still the right call
If you genuinely cannot tell us what the business does, or you want to fiddle with the design every weekend, Wix's editor is more forgiving. For everyone else, the maths breaks at month 22.
What we hand over at launch — and what Wix gives you
Side-by-side at handover, this is the full deliverable list. From us: domain registered in your name at a registrar you log into directly (123-Reg, Cloudflare or Namecheap by default — never our reseller account); hosting account in your name on the provider of your choice (Vercel UK by default); a git repository on GitHub or Bitbucket containing the entire source code with a README and a deploy script; admin credentials to the CMS layer if a CMS is included; GA4 property and Search Console access transferred to your Google account, never shared from ours; a 30-minute Loom video walking through every editable surface; a 12-month support contact for the small things that come up. From Wix at the equivalent point: a login to your Wix dashboard. The domain may or may not be on your account depending on which Wix promotion you signed up under. There is no source code to hand over, no git repository, no CMS in the portable sense — the editor is the only way in. The asymmetry is the whole point.
A note on Squarespace
Most of this analysis applies to Squarespace at slightly different price points. The Business plan in the UK runs around £20 / month annual, the Commerce Basic at £26 / month, the Commerce Advanced at £40 / month, with Squarespace charging zero per-transaction fee above their plan price on the commerce tiers. The export situation is marginally better than Wix (Squarespace produces a static HTML archive on demand) but the export does not include the styling, the dynamic features, or the commerce data — practically, leaving Squarespace is still a rebuild. The same five-year break-even arithmetic produces a similar conclusion. Wix and Squarespace are competing for the same audience and asking the same trade — convenience now, ownership cost later. The trade is reasonable for some businesses; we just want owners to make it with both columns of the spreadsheet visible.