Squarespace Basic vs Core: Which Plan Actually Fits

The choice between Squarespace Basic and Core is the only plan decision most buyers need to think about carefully. Above it, Plus and Advanced are volume arithmetic. Below it, there is nothing. This is where the money is actually decided, and the deciding factor is a single percentage.

The two plans, posted

Everything else that matters is shared. Both plans include the full template library, unlimited products, subscription products, memberships, customer accounts, donation blocks and invoicing. The idea that commerce lives behind a separate tier is a hangover from the retired Commerce plans and no longer describes how Squarespace sells.

The 2% line is the whole argument

Basic charges a 2% commerce transaction fee on what you sell. Core charges none. That fee sits on top of card processing, so on Basic a physical-goods sale carries both the 2% and the 2.9% plus $0.30 card rate.

The break-even is easy to work out. The annual-billing gap between the plans is $10 a month, and 2% of $500 is $10. Sell more than about $500 a month and Core is already the cheaper plan. Sell $2,000 a month and staying on Basic costs you $40 in fees to save $10 in subscription — a straightforwardly bad trade that a surprising number of accounts are sitting in.

Digital products change the maths again

If what you sell is downloads, courses or other digital goods, a separate band applies: 7% on Basic, 5% on Core. That is charged in addition to the commerce fee and the card rate.

Run a $40 digital product through Basic and the fees are $2.80 for the digital band, $0.80 for the commerce fee and about $1.46 in card processing — roughly $5.06, or 12.7% of the sale. The same sale on Core costs $2.00 plus $1.46, about 8.7%. At thirty sales a month that difference alone is more than the plan upgrade. Digital sellers should generally skip Basic entirely, and the fee ladder keeps improving above Core, which we work through in when Plus and Advanced pay for themselves.

The contributor cap

Basic allows two contributors. Core allows unlimited. If you are one person building your own site this sounds irrelevant, and for a while it is.

It stops being irrelevant the moment a designer, a bookkeeper, a virtual assistant or a freelance writer needs access. Two seats disappear quickly once the site owner and one other person are in. Sharing a single login instead is the usual workaround and it is a bad one, because it removes any record of who changed what and makes offboarding a password reset rather than a permission change.

What Core adds operationally

Beyond the fee and the seats, Core opens a set of features that are unglamorous and genuinely useful once you are trading: automatic discounts, carrier-calculated shipping, product waitlists, Google Shopping integration and third-party commerce integrations.

Carrier-calculated shipping is the one that pays for itself quietly. Flat-rate postage is either overcharging customers or undercharging yourself, and on any catalogue with varied weights that gap is larger than the plan difference within a few months.

When Basic is genuinely the right call

Basic is the correct plan for a site that sells nothing at all. A portfolio, a brochure site for a service business that invoices offline, a restaurant with a menu and a phone number, a personal site — all of these get the full template library, the full editor and unlimited pages for $19 a month on annual billing.

It is also reasonable for a site that sells something genuinely incidental: a handful of prints a year, an occasional workshop place. Under about $500 a month in sales, the 2% costs less than the upgrade. Above it, you are paying Squarespace more to be on the cheaper plan.

What neither plan includes

It is as useful to know where the two tiers are identical, because a surprising amount of advice implies otherwise.

Both give you the complete template library with no premium designs held back, unlimited pages, unlimited storage and bandwidth, the Fluid Engine editor, SSL, blogging, forms, member areas and the whole of Squarespace's design tooling. Neither includes Email Campaigns or Acuity Scheduling, which are billed as separate products regardless of which website plan you hold.

Neither includes a second year of domain registration either. The included domain comes with annual billing on a new site and then renews at the standard rate, which is one of the items that makes the second-year bill higher than the first.

And neither changes your export position. Whatever you build on Basic or Core, the portability limits are the same, which is a platform-level constraint rather than a plan feature.

Moving between them

Upgrading from Basic to Core takes effect immediately and nothing about your site changes except the fees and the seat limit. There is no migration, no rebuild and no downtime — it is a billing change, and Squarespace prorates the difference against your remaining term.

Downgrading works too, with one thing to check first: if you have added contributors beyond two, you will need to remove the extra seats before the account will drop to Basic. Features that Core enabled, such as carrier-calculated shipping and automatic discounts, stop working at the same time, so any shipping configuration that depended on them needs replacing with flat rates before you move.

Because upgrading is frictionless, there is no reason to buy insurance you do not yet need. Start on the plan that matches what you are doing this quarter and move when the arithmetic changes.

The short answer

If you sell anything with any regularity, start on Core. If you sell nothing, start on Basic and move when that changes — the upgrade is immediate and you are not locked out of it. What you should not do is pick Basic because it is the lowest number on the pricing page and then build a shop on it.

Both plans sit inside the wider picture of what the platform costs and what it withholds, which is set out in our Squarespace review, with every charge itemised on the Squarespace pricing page. If you have already decided, you can open a Squarespace trial and test the plan you picked before paying for a year of it.