Wix and Squarespace are good products. They are not a studio. If you can live inside their templates, and you like moving boxes on a Saturday, they will get a URL on the internet. A lot of Denver businesses start there. A lot of them call us two years later.
This is the comparison we give on the phone, without the pitch deck.
What the builders are actually good at
Speed to a first draft. A restaurant that needs a menu online by Friday can do that in Squarespace. A photographer who wants a grid of images and a contact form can do that in Wix. The editors are visual. You don’t need a developer to change a phone number.
That’s the pitch, and it’s true — until the business is more specific than “a nice grid.”
Where they start to cost you
- It looks like the builder. Clients can feel a template even if they can’t name it. The fonts, the spacing, the same “Meet the team” block. You paid to look like everyone else on the platform.
- You’re the web team. Every copy change, every new service, every broken mobile menu is your Tuesday night. Most owners did not open a shop to become junior designers.
- The monthly never ends, and it climbs. Commerce plans, extra seats, removing the badge, a better SSL — the invoice grows while the site stays the same.
- SEO is possible, not automatic. You can rank from a builder. You can also ship a slow page, duplicate titles, and a blog no one can find. The tool doesn’t care. Google does.
- Leaving is a project. Your content is in their box. Moving to a real host later is a rebuild with extra steps.
What “custom” means at $500
Custom used to mean $8,000 and a twelve-week deck. In 2026 it means a site designed for your business, built with AI doing the production, directed by a designer in Denver. Home, about, services, contact — the pages you actually use — launched on your domain. That’s the $500 offer.
You don’t log into a builder. You send a photo and a sentence. We change it. Hosting is $240 a year and includes those updates, which is the part DIY quietly skips.
A simple rule
Use Wix or Squarespace if you enjoy the software and the business is simple enough that a template doesn’t lie about who you are.
Get a custom site if a stranger should be able to tell, in one scroll, what you do in Denver that the shop down the street doesn’t. Law, medical, construction, food, hospitality — that’s most of our work.
If you’re already on a builder and it feels like a second job, you don’t need another tutorial. You need someone else to own the site. Tell us what you sell. We’ll tell you if $500 is the right number, or if you should stay put.