Squarespace or hire someone? The real comparison is your time
Squarespace makes good-looking sites. The question is not whether it can, but whether you will — and what those evenings are worth.
Squarespace makes genuinely attractive websites. Its templates are better designed than most agency output, and if you have taste and patience you can produce something that looks expensive.
So the honest comparison is not about quality. It is about whether you will actually do it, and what the doing costs you.
The part the price comparison misses
The subscription is visible. Your time is not, so it gets valued at zero, and that is where the maths goes wrong.
Getting a Squarespace site from template to launched is not one evening. There is choosing the template, then discovering it does not fit your content, then rewriting your content to fit the template. There is finding photos, cropping photos, discovering the ones you have are the wrong shape. There is the fiddling — spacing, fonts, the section that looks right on a laptop and wrong on a phone.
Realistically it is several evenings for something acceptable, and more if you care. Ask what those evenings are worth against your hourly rate, or against the work you would otherwise do in them, and the comparison changes shape.
Then ask an uncomfortable question: have you already started one and stopped? A large number of people have. If a half-finished site is sitting in an account somewhere, that is data about how the next attempt will go.
What you actually get from a designer
Not better software. Three other things.
Decisions made for you. The hardest part of a website is not building it, it is deciding what goes on it and in what order. A designer doing this for the tenth time makes those calls quickly. You are making them for the first time, with no reference point.
Editing. Most business owners write far too much and cannot tell which parts matter — it is very hard to see your own business from outside. Someone cutting your three paragraphs to one sentence is doing real work.
It being finished. A deadline that is not yours, and someone whose job is to reach it. Left to ourselves, most of us leave it at ninety percent forever.
What you give up
Being straight about it.
Instant control. With Squarespace you can change anything at midnight. If you hand the site to someone else, you either learn their system or ask them. For most people that is a fair trade; for some it is genuinely not.
A lower floor on cost. Squarespace is cheaper than any designer for the first year. Over three or four years the gap narrows, but year one is not close.
The ability to experiment. Fiddling is easier when there is no one to ask.
Squarespace is the right answer if
- You have design instincts and enjoy using them.
- Your site is genuinely simple and unlikely to change much.
- You need it live this week for almost nothing.
- You want to change things yourself, often.
- You are testing an idea that may not survive the year.
Hire someone if
- You have already tried and stalled.
- You would rather spend those evenings on the actual business.
- You want it to look considered rather than assembled from a template everyone recognises.
- Getting the words right is the part you dread.
- You want it done by a date, without you being the bottleneck.
The middle option people forget
You do not have to choose between a subscription you operate yourself and a four-figure agency project.
A fixed-price service sits between them: someone else makes the decisions, writes it properly and launches it, and you pay a small monthly amount to have the running handled and changes made when you need them. Ours is $499 to build, then $49 a month, live in three working days.
The honest comparison against Squarespace: we cost more in year one, roughly similar by year three, and you never spend an evening on it. If those evenings are the thing you are trying to protect, that is the whole argument. If you would enjoy them, use Squarespace — genuinely.