Wix keeps raising prices: what else you can use

If your builder renewal came in higher than you expected, the real issue is structural, not a single price rise: a subscription builder charges you forever, and the bill creeps upward every time you add a domain, an app or more storage. Your options are WordPress on your own hosting, a one-off build, or a managed monthly service.

A florist emailed me last spring genuinely annoyed. Her first year had been cheap. Then the renewal landed, plus the domain, plus the booking app she had added, plus extra storage for her photos. Same website. Noticeably bigger bill. Nothing had gone wrong, exactly. The bill had just quietly grown around her while she wasn’t watching.

Why the bill grows even when the site doesn’t

Website builders sell a base plan. Almost nobody ends up on just the base plan.

The domain is separate after the first year. Business email at your own domain is separate. A booking system, an online shop, a form that does anything clever, extra storage for images: each one adds a line. Then the introductory discount expires and the base plan itself steps up to the standard rate.

None of that is dishonest. It is just how the model works, and it means the price you remember signing up for is rarely the price you are paying two years later. Check your current invoice against your first one. Most people are surprised.

There is a second cost that never appears on any invoice. Your time. Every hour you spend fiddling with a template, chasing a layout that won’t behave on mobile, or working out why the contact form stopped emailing you, is an hour you did not spend earning. For a busy owner that is often the biggest number in the whole comparison.

What the actual alternatives are

Moving from one builder to another is the option people reach for first and regret most. You rebuild the whole site to save a few pounds a month, and you land on a platform with exactly the same subscription structure. Same trap, different logo.

Is WordPress actually cheaper?

On paper yes. In practice it depends entirely on who looks after it.

Hosting is cheap and you own the files outright. That is a genuine advantage, and it is the reason most serious small-business sites end up there eventually. But WordPress is not a finished product. It needs updating, backing up, and occasionally rescuing when a plugin update breaks the layout at eleven at night.

If you enjoy that, you will save real money. If you don’t, you have swapped a subscription you disliked for a job you never wanted. Plenty of abandoned WordPress sites out there prove the point. The full trade-off between platforms sits in Wix vs WordPress vs custom.

Compare over three years, not per month

Monthly figures make everything look similar. Three-year totals separate them.

Take whatever you currently pay, multiply by 36, and add the domain renewals and any app charges. Now do the same for the alternative. Then add the honest number of hours you personally spend on the site each month and price them at whatever your time is worth.

That last step changes the answer for most people. A builder that looks cheap at a modest monthly figure stops looking cheap once you add four hours a month of your own fiddling. Equally, a managed plan looks expensive until you notice it replaces both the software bill and the hours.

Neither result is automatic. Run your own numbers. The method matters more than my conclusion, and monthly cost vs one-off walks the same arithmetic in more detail.

When you should just stay put

Genuinely, most people should.

Stay if the site brings you enquiries, you can update it yourself without dread, and the renewal is affordable. A price rise is irritating. It is not a reason to spend a fortnight rebuilding something that works.

Stay if your business is seasonal and the site is a quiet brochure rather than a working part of your marketing. Trim the add-ons you stopped using, downgrade if you can, and move on with your day.

Move if the platform is genuinely blocking you: you cannot add the pages you need, the site is slow, or you have quietly stopped touching it because it is too much hassle. That last one is the real signal. An abandoned site is a dead site regardless of what platform it sits on.

What we do, plainly

Our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month with no contract, and they cover the site, hosting, updates and getting found in one bill. The difference from a builder is not price, it is that the work happens whether or not you have time this month.

If your renewal has jumped and you are not sure whether to move, send us what you currently pay and what you get and we will tell you straight, including when the sensible answer is to stay where you are and cancel two add-ons. Not everyone needs to switch.

The thing to avoid is drifting: paying a rising bill for a site nobody has touched in two years. That is the expensive option, whichever logo is on it.