Squarespace Review

Anthony Casalena started Squarespace in a university dorm in 2003 and ran it alone until 2006. Permira took it private in October 2024 at around seven billion dollars, and the two years since have gone into design tooling, the Blueprint setup flow and a better mobile app rather than into a pivot.

The pitch has not changed and does not need to. The templates remain the best looking set in the category by a clear distance, the editor constrains you enough that an amateur cannot easily make a page ugly, and hosting, domain, certificate, analytics, storefront and scheduling all arrive in one subscription behind one support line. Nothing breaks on Squarespace, which sounds like faint praise until you have run a site that does.

The constraint is the obvious one: it is a closed system. Custom code is tolerated rather than supported, and moving a site off means exporting the content and rebuilding everything around it.

Price is where it loses ground. Basic is nineteen dollars a month billed annually or twenty five monthly, Core twenty nine and thirty nine, and there is no free tier, only a fourteen day trial. Basic also keeps a two per cent cut of store sales, which pushes most sellers up to Core whether they need it or not.