You Are Getting Ripped Off by Wix in 2026

Wix has a free tier but it is not really usable for a business. You get a Wix branded subdomain and their ads plastered across your site. So realistically you are looking at one of their paid plans.

Their Core plan runs around USD $29 per month. Their Business plan is around USD $36 per month. If you want ecommerce with any real features or less transaction fees, you are heading towards their higher tiers quickly.

That works out to somewhere between USD $348 and $432 per year just for the platform. And that is before you think about a custom email address, which Wix charges separately for, or any premium apps from their marketplace, which adds up fast.

The kicker is that none of that money is building you anything. You do not own your website. If you ever want to move off Wix, you are starting from scratch because you cannot export your site in any meaningful way. You have been renting the whole time.

Here is the part that really gets me. People justify Wix by saying they can manage it themselves and that saves them money. And yes, you can manage it yourself. But there is a cost to that too.

Think about the time you spent learning how to use the editor. The hours figuring out why your mobile layout looked broken. The afternoon you lost trying to get a form to connect to something. The time searching for a plugin that does what you need, only to find out it costs extra.

None of that time is free. If you are a tradesperson, a consultant, a retailer, your time has a real dollar value. Every hour you spend fiddling with your website is an hour you are not doing the work that actually earns you money.

And Wix is not always simple. Their editor has gotten more powerful over the years, which also means it has gotten more complicated. Velo, their developer platform, is its own thing to learn entirely. The promise of a simple drag and drop website quietly turns into a commitment of ongoing time and energy.

The alternative is a custom coded website. That means a developer writes actual code to build your site from the ground up, using modern software and frameworks rather than a drag and drop editor inside a subscription platform. The result is a site that is faster, more flexible, more searchable, and completely yours.

Once it is built, you are not paying a platform just to keep the lights on. You host it yourself, on infrastructure you choose, and the ongoing costs are a fraction of what Wix charges.

Put those three things together and for most small business websites you are looking at under $70 a year in running costs, sometimes less if your traffic is light enough to sit on a free hosting tier. The custom coded site itself is something you pay for once. It does not need rebuilding every couple of years and it is not limited by what a platform decides to support. It can be extended, redesigned or handed to any developer in the world without starting from scratch.

Let's put this plainly. For a typical small business site, here is what the annual cost looks like on each path.

For most small business websites, the total running cost comes in under $70 a year. And in a lot of cases, if your traffic is modest, you can knock that down even further because hosting is free.

The one real upfront cost is paying someone to build the site properly in the first place. But most small business websites pay that off within the first year just from the savings on platform fees.

Wix made sense at a certain point in internet history. When the alternative was paying an agency a lot of money for something you could barely update, a drag and drop builder you could manage yourself was a genuine step forward.

But the landscape has changed. A custom coded website built with modern software loads faster, ranks better in search, and gives you full control over every detail. You are not constrained by templates, app marketplaces, or a platform's decision about what features are available on your pricing tier.

And the running costs after that initial build are genuinely low. Hosting is cheap or free on modern infrastructure. You pick your own domain registrar. You choose your own email provider. Nothing is bundled together to lock you in.

What you are paying Wix for in 2026 is the convenience of having everything under one roof. And that convenience is costing you real money every year for a site you do not own and cannot take with you.

Most of the business owners I talk to are surprised when they see the comparison. They assumed a custom coded site was out of their budget. For a lot of them, it is actually cheaper over two or three years, and the site they end up with performs better and gives them fewer headaches along the way.