Almost every website builder review is written in week one, when the onboarding is still charming and nobody has been billed yet. This one is written from the other end. In 2026 I cancelled two builder subscriptions I had set up and administered myself: a Wix plan in August and a Shopify plan in September. I clicked every button, read every retention offer and watched what each platform does when you tell it you are leaving.
That is a narrow kind of expertise, and I want to be straight about its edges before we start. I have built on Wix, on Shopify and on self-hosted WordPress. I have never paid for Squarespace, Framer, GoDaddy’s builder or Webflow, so they appear here only as pricing pages with a date on them, if at all. There are no star ratings in this post and no “we tested ten platforms”, because I did not.
The two accounts, and what they were actually for
The Wix account ran a small appointment-booking site: a handful of services, online payment at the moment of booking, a calendar, a business mailbox on the domain, and the domain itself registered through Wix. Everything in one subscription, which is precisely the pitch.
The Shopify account ran a small shop with about two dozen products, on the free Clarity theme, with one product-sourcing app installed on its free tier. Again: hosting, checkout, payments, theme and domain all inside one bill.
Both projects ended for reasons that have nothing to do with the software. What is worth writing down is the shutdown itself, because that is the part the comparison charts never cover and the part you cannot evaluate from a free trial.
Cancelling Wix took about ten minutes and three refusals
On 9 August 2026 I turned off auto-renewal on three separate subscriptions in the same account: the Premium plan, the business mailbox and the domain. They are three separate things, and switching off one of them does nothing to the other two. That is the first lesson, and it is the one that costs people money: builders bundle at the point of sale and unbundle at the point of cancellation.
The flow itself was civil but insistent. I was offered three months free, and then a cheaper plan at 8.50 euros a month that would have kept the domain connected without the rest of the features. Both are reasonable offers and both would have kept a monthly charge alive on an account nobody intended to use again, so I declined them.
Turning off auto-renewal does not switch anything off immediately. The plan and the mailbox stayed live until the paid period ended on 19 August, and the domain, which had been paid further ahead, stays registered until July 2027 before it lapses and becomes available to anyone. If you actually want to keep a domain that lives inside a builder, you move it to a registrar before that date rather than after. Where I keep mine and what renewals cost is in the three registrars I use, and where the renewal price hides.
The mailbox was also the login
This is the detail I did not see coming and the reason this post exists. The business mailbox on the domain was part of the Wix subscription. The account login was that same mailbox address. So the day the plan lapsed, the address used to sign into the account that controls the site and the domain stopped receiving mail.
Nothing was lost, because it was caught in time, but think about what a password reset looks like in that state. If you are setting up any platform that sells you both the mailbox and the plan, make the account login an address you own independently, on a domain or a provider that is not the thing you are cancelling. It costs nothing at signup and it is unfixable afterwards.
Shopify switches off at the end of the cycle, not the day you click
The Shopify plan was Basic, bought on a promotion of one euro a month running until 10 November 2026, after which it would have reverted to the standard Basic price. That is a very cheap way to find out whether a shop works and a genuinely expensive surprise if you forget the date.
I cancelled on 5 September 2026. The store did not go dark that day: it stayed accessible until 11 September, the end of the billed cycle, and the plan screen kept offering a reactivate button throughout. Before cancelling I went through the active subscriptions list under Plan, because apps bill separately from the plan and an uninstalled app is not automatically an unsubscribed app. In this case the one app in use was on a free tier and there was nothing else running, but I would not have known that from the main billing figure.
The domain was again a separate switch. It had been bought through Shopify at 16 dollars a year, and turning off its auto-renewal is a different screen from cancelling the plan.
What comes out as a file, and what stays inside
Shopify hands you CSV exports of products, customers and orders from inside the admin. That is not the whole store, because the theme, the page layouts and the app data are not in those files, but the commercially important records leave in a format you can open in a spreadsheet.
Wix is the stricter case. When I closed that site, what survived was what already existed outside the platform: the text, the logo and the photos that already existed on a laptop. There is no equivalent of downloading the site and putting it somewhere else; the pages live in the editor, and the editor lives in the account. Unpublishing is a setting rather than a deletion, so the site sits there in the account and can be republished, which is a fair compromise for a paused project and no help at all for a migration.
This is the difference I would weigh hardest, and it is the subject of the longer head-to-head in Wix vs WordPress, after running both.
What the pricing pages said on 20 September 2026
The invoices on those two accounts are no guide to what you would pay today. So I reopened the pricing pages and wrote down what they say today, from a Spanish connection. Read the currency column: two of these three pages decided what currency to show me based on where I was sitting.
| Platform | Entry tier | Mid tier | Top listed tier | Currency served |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | Free, with Wix advertising on your site; Light $17.77/month | Core $29.77/month, 50 GB | Business Elite $159.77/month | USD, annual billing |
| Shopify | Basic 32 €/month, or 24 €/month billed annually | Grow 92 € / 69 € | Advanced 384 € / 289 €, Plus from 2,100 € | EUR, served from Spain |
| Squarespace | Basic $25/month, or $228/year | Core $39/month, or $348/year | Advanced $139/month, or $1,188/year | USD, with a GBP page too |
Two things that table hides and I would rather say out loud. Shopify’s plan price is not the whole cost of selling: the same page lists transaction fees of 2.1% plus 0.30 euros on Basic, and an extra 2% if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments. And Squarespace has renamed its plans; if you are reading a comparison that still talks about Personal, Business, Commerce and Premium, it was written against a page that no longer exists.
The one I did not cancel
Self-hosted WordPress is the third thing I run, and it is the one still on my card. This blog, a second blog and my agency site all sit on a single Hostinger shared plan. At Hostinger’s published prices (pricing page, checked on 20 September 2026), Premium costs $2.99 a month on a 48-month term and $10.99 at renewal for up to three sites, and three sites on one bill is the reason the arithmetic works against a per-site builder subscription.
What that price does not include is the work, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. In September 2026 I found that neither of my blogs had ever had a page cache, which is my job to fix rather than my host’s, and exactly the class of problem a builder never hands you. The full cost picture, including domains and mail, is in what I pay for hosting, domains and email.
What I would choose now, by the shape of the job
A one-person service business that takes bookings and payments. A builder, and Wix specifically, because the calendar, the payment and the mailbox arrive already wired together and there is nobody to maintain anything. Register the domain somewhere else and make the login an outside address, and you have removed the two things that bite on the way out.
A shop with real products. Shopify did the job it advertises: checkout, payments, shipping and a theme without touching a server. The honest caveat is the fee line rather than the plan line. The alternative people will point you at is WooCommerce on your own hosting, and I have not run a WooCommerce store, so I am not going to hand you an opinion about it dressed up as a comparison.
A site whose point is publishing. Self-hosted WordPress, without much hesitation, because the content is yours as files and an export, and because what goes on the page, ads included, is my decision rather than a plan tier’s. If you want the version of WordPress where somebody else runs the server, the comparison is in WordPress.com vs WordPress.org, and the step-by-step of putting a small business site together is in how I build a small business site, start to finish.
Before I sign up to a builder again
- Where is the domain registered, and can I move it without asking permission?
- Is the account login an address that survives the cancellation of this plan?
- What leaves the platform as a file I can open somewhere else, and what does not?
- When does the promotional price end, and what is the standard price on that date?
None of those are about templates, and templates are what everyone compares. I have now closed two of these accounts, and not once did the drag-and-drop editor matter on the way out. What mattered was who held the domain, who held the mailbox, and what came out as a file.