Got a Squarespace Price Increase Email? What to Do

Whether to leave after a Squarespace price increase depends on how many years you plan to keep the site and how often you touch it. If the new price still feels fair, staying costs you nothing extra. If you have a simple site you rarely change, a one-time move to free hosting (the service that keeps your site online) costs the same as roughly five to thirty-four months of Squarespace Basic on annual billing (CA$252 a year), depending on the size of the site and whether the first-20 price applies, based on the prices Squarespace published on November 9, 2026. The details, with the arithmetic, are below.

First, read your own notice

Squarespace's help center says that plan prices change from time to time, and that if you got an email about a price increase, you pay the updated price on your next renewal date, not on the effective date listed in the email (Squarespace help: choosing a plan, page last updated October 28, 2026). That page does not name a percentage, and this article does not either. The amount you pay is whatever your own email and billing page say.

So open the email, find your renewal date and write down the new yearly total. The tables below use the list prices Squarespace published on November 9, so hold your number up against them.

The same help page says discounts apply to your first payment, and the next renewal is charged at full price. A site that felt cheap in year one can jump at the first renewal for that reason alone, with no separate increase involved.

What Squarespace charges in Canadian dollars

On November 9, 2026, the Squarespace pricing page listed these prices in CAD:

The yearly columns are the monthly price times twelve. The page was also showing a 50% off badge that day, and it does not say whether a given price is already discounted. Compare these numbers with your renewal email before you rely on them.

Option 1: stay

Staying is a fair choice if you edit the site often, use features that only Squarespace provides, or simply like the editor. A small price rise on a site you are happy with may not be worth the effort of moving. The cost of staying is the table above, every year, for as long as the site is up.

Option 2: downgrade

A cheaper plan or annual billing lowers the number. On the November 9 page, going from Core to Basic on annual billing is CA$384 down to CA$252 a year, and annual billing on Basic is CA$108 a year less than paying monthly. Check your own account page for what your current plan includes before you switch.

Option 3: switch to another builder

Another paid builder is a third route, and it keeps a monthly bill. Webflow's pricing page, read on November 9, 2026, lists its Basic plan at $15 a month billed yearly, for simple sites that do not need a CMS, with 300 static pages and a custom domain. Webflow states all its prices in US dollars, and the page shows no Canadian-dollar price, so a direct comparison with the CAD table above would mix currencies. Webflow also changed its own plan prices in 2026: its announcement says an existing Basic plan's price increases to $15 a month yearly, or $25 monthly. Its $25-a-month Premium plan, billed yearly, adds the CMS (content management system). You would also be rebuilding the site in a new editor.

Option 4: leave

Leaving means paying once to move the site, then paying nothing for hosting. SiteFree's one-time price is $99 CAD for a site of up to 5 pages plus one blog or other section, for the first 20 sites, then $360. A larger site of up to 100 pages is $199 for the first 20 sites, then $720. Over five years, against Squarespace Basic and Core on annual billing:

These are the plan prices as published, held flat for five years. If Squarespace changes its prices, as its help center says it does from time to time, the Squarespace rows move and the SiteFree rows stay put. The comparison leaves out your domain name registration and any email mailboxes you buy separately. It also leaves out the AI assistant subscription described below, which you can stop between edits.

Put another way, measured against Basic on annual billing at CA$21 a month, the $99 price is about five months, $199 is about nine and a half months, $360 is about seventeen months, and $720 is about thirty-four months.

What happens to the site and what you can take with you

The worry that comes up most is losing the site and starting over. Squarespace's export tool produces a file in the format WordPress (another website builder) reads. Its help page says that file covers one blog page with its posts and up to 1000 comments per post, plus layout pages, text blocks and image blocks. It leaves out other blogs, product and video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS (code that restyles a site). The page also warns that if you import into a self-hosted WordPress site with the WordPress Importer plugin, your images might not copy over and can stay linked to Squarespace, so they stop working once you cancel. It says importing into WordPress.com copies the images instead.

That is why the order matters: move the site first, check it, then cancel. For the step-by-step version, read how to move a Squarespace site to Cloudflare. If your question is the domain, how to stop paying Squarespace and keep your domain covers it. The Squarespace pricing page also notes that a free first-year domain renews at the standard rate, so check the renewal date and price for yours.

Your domain stays yours. Once you approve the new site, SiteFree tells you the one change to make where you bought the domain, and does the rest.

Editing the site afterwards

Squarespace's help center says the editor has no auto-save or revision history, and that once you exit it, changes can't be undone (Squarespace help: lost content, page dated August 29, 2025). Squarespace can restore pages and blog posts you deleted in the last 30 days. Page drafts exist, but its help page says they are for Premium and Enterprise customers on version 7.1 only, and those names are not among the four plans on the pricing page above.

A SiteFree site works the way a professional developer sets one up:

Every change starts on a copy of the site, you get a private preview link, and nothing goes live until you say yes. Every change is kept in your site's history, so going back to an earlier version means asking the assistant to undo it. It is not a button.

It has a cost. The assistant is a subscription you hold yourself, such as Claude Pro at US$20 a month, which you can stop between edits. You need a free GitHub account, because your site's files live there. After you approve a change, the live site updates a few minutes later. You never run Git commands (the technical commands that track a site's files) yourself, and any web developer can also edit the site. For a site you change a few times a year, that is a small and occasional cost. For one you change every week, the Squarespace editor may suit you better.

Google rankings and old links

An old address that stops working loses the visitors and links that point at it. SiteFree redirects every old address to its new page, so search results, bookmarks and links from other sites land in the right place. Nobody can promise where a page ranks after any move, and this one does not either.

The done-for-you option

SiteFree sells this move. It is a Canadian (Montreal) migration service with prices in CAD. We rebuild your pages and posts to match your design closely and host the result free in your own Cloudflare account, with the files in your own GitHub account. The site is served from Cloudflare's global network. You get a private preview within two business days of payment, up to two rounds of fixes, and a full refund any time before you approve. Your old site stays live until then, and you keep your domain.

The price is $99 CAD one time for Small (first 20 sites, then $360) and $199 for Large (first 20, then $720), with no monthly fee. A shop or member area gets a fixed quote. To see which applies to you, check your site.