Squarespace

Who owns it

Squarespace is a New York company founded in 2004 by Anthony Casalena, listed on the NYSE in 2021 and taken private by the UK private-equity firm Permira in a deal that closed on 17 October 2024 at about $7.2 billion; Casalena rolled most of his stake and stays one of the largest shareholders. It owns Acuity Scheduling and, since 2023, the old Google Domains business. European customers are billed through Squarespace Ireland. We found no Russian or Chinese link in ownership or engineering.

What it costs

Prices are in pounds excluding VAT (the help centre says so, and the checkout shows the VAT line), read on 16 September 2026. Core is the plan we score: £17 a month on annual billing, £24 billed monthly, a 41 percent premium for not committing. It gives unlimited contributors, full CSS and JavaScript, advanced analytics, a shop with no Squarespace transaction fee and card rates from 2 percent plus 25p through Squarespace Payments. Basic at £12 or £16 caps contributors at two, charges 2 percent on shop sales and 7 percent on digital content, and does not list code injection, which is why it fails our business-plan test. Plus (£29 or £36) and Advanced (£79 or £89) cut card rates and membership fees. A custom domain is free for the first year on annual billing only; the trial is 14 days with no card. The pricing page showed a "50% off" badge and a banner code on every plan above Basic on both billing toggles when we read it, so the number a visitor sees is a promotion and the prices above are the list prices behind it.

What you get and what to watch

The editor is Fluid Engine, a grid-based section editor a non-designer can run, with Blueprint AI to draft a site and native forms, blog, scheduling and member sites. Multilingual is not native: Squarespace's own route is the third-party Weglot integration. SEO controls cover titles, descriptions and an automatic sitemap; images are served as WebP. A native cookie banner and a published DPA under UK and EU standard clauses cover the GDPR side; SOC 2 Type II is mentioned only on the enterprise tier. The status page showed only minor items in the two weeks before our read. Support is 24/7 by email and weekday live chat in US hours; Squarespace has a help article explaining why it does not offer phone support.

Simple is also the ceiling. In our own past use of Squarespace, the editor that makes it so easy to start became the limit once a site needed more than pages, a blog and a straightforward shop: no plugin ecosystem, no roles and approvals, multilingual only through a third party, and custom behaviour reduced to code injection. That is why it now shares first place with WordPress.com rather than holding it alone.

Leaving is where Squarespace loses further points. Its own help centre says the export is one XML file of blog posts and basic page text, one blog at a time, with no design, CSS, images or navigation; there is no fuller export at any tier. The official MCP server at mcp.squarespace.com covers domain search and name generation only, not your site. In July 2024 attackers hijacked domains that had migrated from Google Domains by registering accounts against the email addresses on file; Squarespace called it an OAuth weakness and fixed it within hours. Trustpilot is 3.6 on 5,298 invited reviews, split almost evenly between five-star and one-star, with the one-star themes in September 2026 about reaching a human and billing.

Partly first-party: Saaskly's team has built and run Squarespace sites in the past, and the verdict on where it stops draws on that. Pricing, plan limits and specifications above were assessed on published pricing, vendor documentation, the vendor's own help centre and status pages, and third-party reviews.