Wix wins year one, every time - that is the honest place to start. But websites are not bought for a year, and when you run the numbers to year five, the cheap option quietly changes name.
Year one: Wix wins
A capable builder plan costs roughly £10-£40 a month, you can be live this weekend, and no agency invoice arrives. For a market stall, a lunch menu or an idea you are still testing, that is genuinely the right answer - we say so in print, and we mean it.
Years two to five: the creep
Then the meter runs. The plan renews at the non-promotional rate. The features you actually need live in paid apps - reviews, bookings, proper SEO controls - each a few pounds a month, forever. Sell online and transaction fees skim every order on top of the payment processor's cut. None of these are scandals; they are the business model. Renting is how the landlord gets paid.
And there is the invisible line on the bill: your evenings. On a builder, you are the designer, the developer and the person who cannot quite make the header behave. That time was always worth something.
The ceiling nobody mentions
The real cost is not monthly - it is the day you outgrow the template. A builder site cannot leave its platform: nothing meaningful exports, so “upgrading” means starting again from zero, paying full price for a proper build anyway, with five years of rent behind you and no equity to show for it. You never owned the thing you were improving.
Renting is fine until the day you realise you have been paying for a house you can never own - and the landlord keeps the lot when you move.
The bespoke ledger
A bespoke build costs real money up front - we published the honest ranges - plus hosting and optional support. What that buys is the opposite of a ceiling: a site engineered for your actual business, search equity that compounds instead of resetting, a warranty and a phone that answers, and an asset that is yours. Spread over five years, the gap narrows dramatically; count the rebuild-from-zero that the builder route usually ends in, and it often inverts.
The honest verdict
If your website is a noticeboard: builder, no shame in it. If your website is how customers find, judge and pay you: the five-year bill says build it properly, once - and stop paying rent on your own front door.
