Wix pricing: what it really costs

Which Wix plan does a freelancer, local business or course creator actually need?

Start with what the site needs to do, not how big the business is. Wix’s free plan builds and hosts a full site with no credit card and no time limit, but it publishes only to a Wix subdomain, keeps Wix’s own branding on every page, and sits outside Wix’s detailed plan-comparison table entirely. The moment a real business wants its own domain, the free plan stops being an option, and the cheapest paid tier, Light, becomes the entry point at $17 a month billed annually. Light removes Wix branding, adds a custom domain with a free domain for the first year, and allows 2 site collaborators including the owner — enough for a freelancer or a local-service owner working alone. Light’s real limit isn’t storage or collaborators, though: it excludes online payments, customer accounts and every ecommerce tool outright. A course creator or store owner needs Core at $29 a month instead, which is also where the collaborator cap rises to 5. An 8-person team, or any business that wants automated sales tax and loyalty tiers with point expiration, needs Business at $39 a month — the plan Wix marks “Recommended” on its own pricing page. Business Elite, at $159 a month, only earns its price once a site genuinely needs 100 collaborators or unlimited storage; little else on that tier justifies the jump by itself.

Why won’t Wix show you a real monthly price?

This is the catch that matters most on this page. Every price on wix.com/plans is the annual, paid-in-full rate shown as a monthly-equivalent figure. Wix’s Help Center confirms the company also sells true month-to-month and multi-year Premium plans, but says plainly that “the final price can be seen on the purchase page, before payment is completed” — meaning nowhere public. You only see the monthly rate after logging in, choosing a plan, and selecting Monthly at checkout instead of Yearly. Some independent pricing guides publish an estimated month-to-month number anyway; we won’t repeat any of those figures here, because they disagree with each other, none of them links to a Wix-owned page, and Wix could change the real number at any time without telling anyone who copied down someone else’s guess. What we can say for certain: paying annually means one upfront charge rather than twelve smaller ones — $17 a month on Light works out to $204 charged upfront for the year, and $39 a month on Business is $468 upfront. Switching to monthly billing, whatever that rate turns out to be once you see it, forfeits the free first-year domain and the bundled premium apps that come with an annual plan. Wix also runs no free trial of any paid plan; its Help Center says directly that new Premium purchases instead carry a 14-day money-back guarantee if the plan turns out to be wrong.

What pushes a Wix bill above the plan price?

Card processing is the biggest variable for any site that takes payments. Wix Payments charges 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction on domestic US cards, more for American Express, PayPal, and other alternative methods, plus an extra 1.5% on any cross-border card. Separately, Wix’s “Pricing Plans” feature — its name for subscriptions, memberships and other recurring billing — carries its own service fee on top of that: 4% of each charge on Core, 2% on Business, and 0% on Business Elite; Light doesn’t offer Pricing Plans at all, so the fee never applies there. That fee is specific to recurring billing: ordinary one-time product and service sales carry no separate Wix commission beyond the card-processing rate above. A chargeback costs $15 outright, and more when the disputed payment ran through PayPal. A domain bought outside the free first year that comes bundled with an annual plan has its own price on Wix’s Domains page, and that page shows only first-year rates, not what a renewal costs later. One more variable has nothing to do with features at all: Wix’s Help Center says Premium prices vary by country without saying by how much for any of them, so a business outside the US should expect a different number than everything quoted on this page.

What happens when an agency manages several Wix sites?

Badly, compared to a single-site business. Wix bills every site as its own subscription with its own login, and the collaborator cap attached to each plan — 2 on Light, 5 on Core, 10 on Business, 100 on Business Elite — applies per site, not per account. An agency running ten client sites isn’t paying for one plan with ten sites attached to it; it’s paying for ten separate subscriptions, each chosen and billed on its own, with no bundled multi-site discount published anywhere on wix.com/plans. That also rules out pooling collaborator seats across sites: a designer working on six client sites needs to be added as a collaborator on each one separately, and every site still counts that designer against its own cap. For a single-site freelancer or local-service business this pricing model causes no trouble; for an agency juggling many client properties, the bill and the login count both grow in lockstep with every new site it takes on.

Is Wix cheaper than Squarespace, Webflow, or Shopify?

Mostly, but not entirely — the comparison isn’t apples-to-apples, and it only holds against one of the three. Wix’s Light plan, $17 a month billed annually, undercuts Squarespace‘s Basic at $25 a month billed monthly, and even beats Squarespace’s own annual rate, $19 a month. Webflow is the exception: Wix’s $17 a month undercuts Webflow’s cheapest site plan with a custom domain, Basic, only against its $25 monthly rate — billed annually, Basic drops to $15 a month, cheaper than Wix. Squarespace and Webflow both publish that monthly number on their own pricing pages; Wix does not publish one anywhere for Light. Light is also the wrong comparison once payments matter, since it has none: Shopify‘s cheapest real plan, Basic at $39 a month billed monthly ($29 billed yearly), is built around selling from day one, while Wix’s own payments and ecommerce tools only start on Core. Pick Wix Light for a straightforward site or blog with no online sales and where an annual commitment is fine. Pick Shopify once the job is running a real product catalog. Pick Squarespace when knowing the exact monthly rate before you commit matters more than any edge on the annual price. Pick Webflow instead once the site needs a CMS, since its annual rate already beats Wix’s.