Customers were rightly pissed last week when Squarespace sent out notices of price hikes of 20-26% year over year. This price jump took us by surprise but Squarespace has been a soulless corporation on the decline since at least 2024, when private equity bought them. Their customer loyalty is fading fast and it can't withstand much more bad behavior and poor communication.
Many Squarespace customers took to social media to seek alternatives or publicly cancel their plan. Who needs a clunky website builder when you can vibecode something with Claude? Squarespace support was undoubtedly inundated with requests to change plans and complaints from angry website owners.
Yesterday, they issued a correction to most customers saying the new pricing was due to an "internal error" and that it was "higher than intended." Customers are reporting their price increase is now anywhere from $17 to $55 US dollars. I wrote Squarespace to get confirmation of which plans were affected and what the changed prices are, but have yet to hear back from them. Their email read "certain plans," which implies that this pricing debacle didn't affect all plans.
The two emails I received from Squarespace (I removed my clients' domains with yellow boxes)
Squarespace does not generally interact with customers on their social media accounts and they posted nothing about either the price hike or the mistake correction on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, X or in their press releases. The only communication from them is happening privately via email to customers. That makes it hard for us to get a clear read on what plans are changing and by how much.
Still, it's pretty weird they pretended this was just a fluke, especially given that they issued the revised prices a full week later. You'd think someone at Squarespace would want to use this high profile moment to issue a mea culpa, reassure customers they're actually listening to us and show they care about our business.
Instead, they seemingly chose to have their legal team draft the coldest possible correction to send out. This did nothing to rebuild customer trust.
Web designer and digital marketer Lex Lancaster said on Threads, "The narrative that it was an internal error, considering the message I received back from them, doesn’t make sense." Brand consultant and creator Jana Zednickova said it was "still pathetic and offensive." My favorite take came from brand designer Javier Suarez who wrote, "We really don't bully corporations enough."
No one's buying the story that this was a mistake.
Post-correction, customers are split on leaving. Some say this gave them the kick in the pants they needed to plan an exit sometime in the next year and others are planning to stick it out on Squarespace. Web designers are offering all kinds of advice, including why they chose to build on Squarespace, why they love WordPress, Showit, Framer, Webflow or another alternative, or why it's much more expensive to leave and rebuild elsewhere.
I moved most of my websites off Squarespace in the last two years because I knew this private equity situation was going to go downhill for us (listen to this episode of Lever Time if you're confused about why private equity is ALWAYS bad.) But I'm also seeing a renewed conversation about whether most of us even need websites when our identities are spread across platforms and search traffic is way down. We do. I think we do. The AI thieves are stealing everything from us. The social media companies are hoarding all the attention for themselves. The search companies don't want to send us traffic anymore. The marketplaces offer us pennies for our creative work. You need a digital space you can fully control. It doesn't need to be multipage or super designy, but it needs to be yours. Untouchable by tech company whims. Keeping our own little plots of lands feels more important than ever, even if it's getting more expensive to do so.
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Lex Roman
