Every major website builder has a free plan. Wix is free. Squarespace has a free trial. The free plan is one of the most effective marketing tools in SaaS — get users invested in building something on your platform, then make the free experience painful enough that upgrading feels inevitable. This is the stated business model of every public website builder company. The free plan is a customer acquisition cost, not a product offering.
What Free Plans Actually Include
Wix free includes a Wix-branded subdomain at yourbusiness.wixsite.com, Wix ads on every page, no custom domain, no Google Analytics, and no ecommerce. Squarespace free is a 14-day trial — after that it is $16 per month minimum. None of these are viable for a real business. A Wix-branded subdomain with ads on every page tells every visitor you could not afford a real website.
The Upgrade Treadmill
Remove Wix ads and get a custom domain: $17 per month. Add ecommerce: $29 per month. Advanced features: $36 per month. This architecture is deliberate. The free plan creates investment in the platform. The paid tiers extract value from that investment incrementally. By the time you realize you are spending over $400 per year, you have two years of content on a platform you cannot easily leave. See the Durable comparison for the same pattern at a different price point.
The Hidden SEO Cost
A subdomain does not build domain authority the way a root domain does. When you upgrade to a custom domain, you are starting your SEO history over. Every backlink pointing to your old Wix subdomain becomes worthless. Every page Google indexed has to be recrawled. Depending on how long you built on the free plan, this can represent months of lost SEO investment. See the full WordPress vs Wix SEO comparison for the technical details.
The 3-Year Math
Wix Core at $29 per month totals $1,044 over three years — for a site you still do not own, after months building on a branded subdomain. CBS Growth is $699 once, with $100 per year for hosting. Over three years that is $899 total, on your own domain from day one, with no ads and no branded subdomain phase. See why ownership matters and our full one-time pricing breakdown.
CBS is not free. It is a one-time purchase for a site you own on your own domain from day one — no ads, no branded subdomains, no upgrade treadmill.