The Second-Year Bill: What Squarespace Costs After the Discount

The second-year Squarespace bill is reliably higher than the first, and not because anything went wrong. Year one carries an included domain and no accumulated add-ons. Year two carries neither. Nothing here is hidden — it is all published — but it is spread across several pages and never totalled in one place, which is why people are surprised.

What changes between year one and year two

Three things. The domain that was included with your first annual plan renews at the standard registrar rate. Any add-on you signed up for during the year is now a full-year charge rather than a partial one. And the plan itself renews at the going rate, with no introductory discount attached.

There is also a fourth, less predictable item: platform pricing moves. Squarespace restructured its plans in 2026, retiring the Personal, Business and Commerce tiers in favour of Basic, Core, Plus and Advanced, and accounts moving onto the new structure cannot move back. Any assumption that your renewal will match your first-year price should be checked, not assumed.

The domain renewal

An annual plan includes one year of domain registration on a new site. It is a genuine inclusion worth about $20, and it is a first-year offer. Afterwards the domain renews at the standard rate, roughly $20 a year for a .com at the time of checking, and rather more for the fashionable extensions.

This is the single most common surprise on a second-year bill, and it is the smallest item on it. Mention it mainly so it is not the thing that makes you distrust the rest of the invoice.

The add-ons you signed up for in month four

This is where the real money is. Two Squarespace products are billed separately from the website plan, and both are the kind of thing a business adds a few months in and then stops noticing.

Email Campaigns starts at around $8 a month at the time of checking, with unlimited contacts and a capped send volume, rising through tiers as sends increase. Acuity Scheduling, also owned by Squarespace, starts at roughly $16 a month on annual billing. Neither figure is published in a form we could read directly from Squarespace, so both are taken from independent pricing round-ups and should be confirmed against the company's own pages before you budget.

Individually they are small. Together, across a year, they are comparable to the website plan itself — which is the point worth making.

Three sites, totalled

Read the bottom row against the headline price. A site the pricing page describes as $49 a month is, fully loaded, closer to $75 a month in its second year. That is not sharp practice — every component is listed somewhere — but it is the number you should be comparing against alternatives, not the one on the button.

What the total does not include

Card processing sits on top of all of this and scales with sales rather than time: 2.9%, 2.7% or 2.5% plus $0.30 per domestic transaction depending on plan, with Basic adding its own 2% commerce fee and digital goods carrying a separate band. A store turning over $3,000 a month is paying roughly $1,000 a year in processing that appears nowhere in the table above.

Nor does it include anything you pay a human for. Copywriting, photography and design help are the largest real costs of most small websites and they have nothing to do with which platform you chose.

And it does not include the cost of leaving. If you decide in year three that the platform no longer fits, the bill is a rebuild rather than a migration, because so little of a Squarespace site travels. That is not an annual cost, but it is a contingent one, and it belongs in the same mental column as the renewal date.

Why year one feels cheaper than it is

Part of this is ordinary promotional framing and part of it is how annual billing distorts memory. You pay one large sum in month one, feel the pain once, and then have eleven months of no invoices at all. By the time the second charge arrives, the first has stopped feeling like a monthly cost.

The included domain compounds it. In year one the domain is a feature you were given; in year two it is a line on an invoice. Nothing changed except which column it sits in, but a cost that appears from nowhere reads as a price rise even when it is not.

Add-ons do the same thing at a smaller scale. A scheduling tool bought in March bills a part-year in year one and a full year in year two, so the number goes up without the product changing. None of this is anybody being sneaky. It is simply what a subscription stack looks like once it has been running long enough to be ordinary.

What to actually do about it

1. Diary the renewal date the day you buy. Renewal payments are not refundable, which makes the date more important than the price.
2. Review the add-ons annually. The scheduling tool you added for a launch may be earning its keep, or may be a subscription nobody has opened in five months.
3. Check whether your plan tier still matches your volume in both directions. Overpaying for Plus at low volume is as common as clinging to Basic while paying 2% on real sales.
4. Price the domain separately. Keeping registration at an independent registrar costs the same and removes one line from the platform bill.

None of this argues against the platform. It argues for looking at the total rather than the headline, which is what our Squarespace review is built around, with every individual charge itemised on the Squarespace pricing page. If the total still works for you, you can start a Squarespace plan knowing what year two looks like.