The 2026 Squarespace Price Increase: What Happened, and What It Means for Your Site

What Squarespace changed, and by how much

There was no press release and no pricing memo. The change arrived as automated billing notices in subscriber inboxes on July 17, 2026, and was picked up the same day by PetaPixel, which contacted Squarespace and received no response before publication.

The annual plan changes reported were:

Monthly billing moved less: Core went from $36 to $39 (up 8 percent) and Plus from $56 to $65 (up 16 percent), with Basic and Advanced unchanged.

Two days later, Fstoppers tied the increase to Squarespace's "Design Intelligence" push, the banner covering Blueprint AI and the built-in copy generation assistants. That framing is the part that stung. The people on the forums were not asking for a layout generator. They were paying for a portfolio and a contact form, and the bill went up to fund features they never open. As one subscriber quoted by PetaPixel put it, "I feel like I'm paying for things I sincerely did not ask for, the biggest thing being AI."

There is ownership context too. Squarespace has been controlled by private equity firm Permira since October 17, 2024, when a $7.2 billion all-cash take-private closed and the company delisted from the NYSE. Permira had to raise its offer from $44 to $46.50 per share after Institutional Shareholder Services advised investors that the original bid undervalued the business. Founder Anthony Casalena stayed on as CEO. Price increases following a leveraged buyout are not a conspiracy theory. They are a standard part of the model.

Then Squarespace called it an error

On July 24, 2026, exactly one week after the first notice, a second email went out. It opened by saying Squarespace was writing "to correct a pricing error in a recent email" and blamed "an internal error that misapplied prices on certain plans." It also confirmed nobody had been billed incorrectly: "As the previous email was a notice only, we can confirm you have not been charged as part of this issue."

The correction listed revised figures per account rather than publishing a new table. One customer on a legacy Annual Standard website plan was quoted $165.00 for the year, effective at their next renewal. In the original round, customers had reported increases ranging from $17 to $55 depending on their plan and how long they had been on it.

Whether you accept "internal error" is your call. The detail commentators keep returning to is the gap. A full week is a long time for a billing bug to sit unnoticed, and a short time to arrive at a softer number after the reaction. What is not in dispute: prices went up, the direction of travel is set, and a meaningful share of subscribers no longer trust the figure on their next invoice.

What this actually costs you

Increases land at your individual renewal date, not on one company-wide switch date. If you renewed in June you are on old pricing for another eleven months and this is a future problem. If you renew in August it is a now problem. Check your renewal date before you do anything else.

Run the arithmetic on Core. At $23 a month billed annually you were paying $276 a year. At $29 you pay $348. That is $72 more per year for a site that did not change, and $360 over five years, before the next increase. A subscription is a recurring liability, so every raise compounds against content you last touched in 2023.

The second cost never appears on the invoice. It is that you cannot shop around. A rented site has no exit price, only an exit cost, and the platform knows it.

What leaving Squarespace actually looks like

Squarespace does have an export, and it is thinner than most owners expect. Per Squarespace's own help documentation, the XML export covers basic pages plus one blog page and the posts under it. It does not include your images or video. Product pages, album pages, event pages, index pages and folders do not come across. Audio, video and product blocks do not come across. Style changes and custom CSS do not come across.

In plain terms: you get your words and your blog. You do not get your site.

So the realistic path is a rebuild, not a transfer:

1. Check your renewal date first. It sets your deadline and tells you whether you have eleven months or eleven days.
2. Export the XML for your text and posts, and treat it as the source of truth for copy.
3. Download your images separately. They are not in the export. Use your originals if you still have them.
4. Inventory your live URLs before you cancel anything. Every page that ranks needs to keep its path or get a 301 redirect.
5. Rebuild on something you hold, where the output is a set of files rather than a page rendered from someone else's database.
6. Move the domain out or repoint DNS, and cut over only once the replacement is live and verified.
7. Cancel last. Never first. Your Squarespace site goes dark the moment the subscription lapses.

Step 4 is where self-managed migrations quietly lose traffic. Step 7 is where people lose the site entirely.

How WebForger picks this up

This is the situation our rescue service exists for. You send the URL of your Squarespace site. We crawl the public pages and rebuild the whole thing as static HTML served from Cloudflare's edge, keeping your copy, your images, your titles, your meta descriptions and your internal links. Important URLs stay where they are or get mapped with 301 redirects, so the rankings you already paid for come with you.

You get a private preview first, and your Squarespace site keeps running the entire time. You compare both versions against a real side-by-side Lighthouse report, and you switch DNS only when the replacement is clearly better. Nothing about your live site changes until you say so.

The pricing model is the actual point. WebForger is a one-off setup quoted to your scope with the first year of hosting included, then simple ongoing care by tier. There is no plan tier waiting to be repriced in a July email. And if you ever want out, you export the full site as HTML and hand it to any host or any developer. That is what owning a site has to mean for the word to be worth using.