Web DesignPlatforms

Squarespace vs Webflow vs a Custom Build: Choosing a Platform in New Zealand

Kage Works9 August 20268 min read

Webflow rebuilt its plan lineup on 13 May 2026, folding the old CMS and Business site plans into a single Premium tier (Webflow Help Center). Squarespace raised its subscription prices in July, taking the Core plan from US$23 to US$29 a month on annual billing, a 26% increase, and delivered the news by billing email rather than any public announcement (PetaPixel, Fstoppers).

Two repricings in three months, on the two platforms most New Zealand small businesses compare. The monthly fee leads most comparison articles on this subject, and it's the number you control least.

Two things hold still long enough to decide on: the point where each platform stops you, and the cost of leaving it. A third, the person who publishes a change in month seven, breaks the tie. Squarespace, Webflow and a custom build separate cleanly on all of them.

Add GST and your bank's cut to every US dollar price

Both platforms bill in US dollars. The kiwi bought around 59 US cents in early August 2026 (Trading Economics), so Squarespace Core at US$29 lands near NZ$49 a month before anything else touches it.

Your bank takes the next slice. BNZ charges 2.25% of the New Zealand dollar value on every foreign currency transaction (BNZ), and Westpac charges 1.83% on personal cards and 2.50% on business credit cards (Westpac). GST adds 15% after that, since Squarespace's listed prices exclude tax and New Zealand customers get it applied at checkout (Squarespace Help Center).

Most businesses reading this can remove that 15%, and few of them do. Inland Revenue's rules for offshore suppliers of remote services exempt an overseas company from charging GST to a New Zealand business that is GST-registered and buying for business use (Inland Revenue). Squarespace runs a form for it: submit your IRD registration and the GST line disappears from your invoice (Squarespace Help Center). The same rule covers any offshore supplier, so check your Webflow invoice for a GST line and hand over your number if one appears.

Registration is compulsory above NZ$60,000 of annual turnover and voluntary below it (Inland Revenue), which puts sole traders under the threshold in the worst position: they pay the 15% and can't claim it back.

Core at US$29 a month, billed annually, works out around NZ$592 a year at 59 cents, NZ$605 with a 2.25% card fee, and NZ$696 if GST applies. The spread between the top and bottom of that range covers a domain and business email for the year.

Squarespace stops at the code injection line

The Basic plan blocks custom code. Squarespace makes code injection available on Core, Plus and Advanced (Squarespace Help Center), so a booking widget from the system you already run, or a CSS fix for spacing your template gets wrong, requires Core at minimum. Budget from Core.

Above that line Squarespace does the thing it's built for. One person who isn't a developer keeps the site current without booking anyone's time. A cafe changing its hours or a builder adding last month's job photos gets exactly what it needs, and our breakdown of NZ website costs shows how much studio time that saves.

The ceiling arrives when your site has to do something rather than show something. Quoting flows with rules, or stock counts that match another system, turn into third-party embeds sitting on a platform that didn't plan for them, and the site gets slower and harder to change with each addition.

Webflow hands control to a designer and sends you two bills

Webflow splits its billing in a way that catches owners out. A Site plan covers the site, and Workspace seats cover the people building in it, charged separately (Webflow Help Center). The free Starter plan publishes to a .webflow.io address with 1,000 monthly visits, 50 CMS items and two static pages, so any real domain means a paid Site plan.

After the May restructure, Basic covers sites with no CMS and Premium carries the CMS work, bundling 20,000 CMS items and 40 collections where the old plans sold item add-ons (Webflow Help Center). Agencies tracking the change put Basic at US$15 a month billed yearly and Premium at US$25 (BRIX Templates, Memberstack). Existing customers move onto the new prices at renewal rather than immediately.

Selling online changes the maths. Webflow left its Ecommerce plans out of the May changes, and the Standard tier still adds a 2% Webflow fee to each sale on top of your payment processor (LiteExtension). Stripe's New Zealand rate for domestic online card payments dropped to 2.65% plus NZ$0.30 on 1 December 2025, after the Commerce Commission cut interchange caps and Stripe passed the reduction on (Stripe). A NZ$120 order on Ecommerce Standard therefore costs NZ$5.88 to take, close to 4.9% of the sale.

Working the crossover from the listed prices: Ecommerce Plus at US$74 a month billed annually removes the 2% fee for US$45 more than Standard's US$29, so the upgrade pays for itself once you clear roughly US$2,250 of monthly sales, around NZ$3,800. Below that, Standard costs less.

Day-to-day editing works, with a limit. The Webflow Editor lets a non-technical owner update CMS content, while layout changes happen in the Designer, which needs someone who knows Webflow. Several New Zealand studios build on it, so this isn't a dead end, though it does mean a retainer or a phone call instead of doing it yourself on a Sunday.

A custom build swaps a licence for a labour market

No platform licence sits between you and your own site. Hosting a static or React marketing site costs close to nothing: Cloudflare Pages includes unlimited bandwidth on its free plan with 500 deploys a month (Cloudflare), and Netlify's free tier covers 100 GB of bandwidth and 300 build minutes (Netlify). Your recurring bill drops to a domain and whatever services the site calls.

The money moves to the build and to whoever maintains it, which for a New Zealand studio usually means NZ$5,000 to NZ$20,000 up front. That buys the two things the platforms won't sell: logic that matches how your business works, and a codebase any competent developer can pick up. It also concentrates risk in one relationship, so get admin access and a handover document on day one. Our list of questions to ask a web design agency covers the wording that pins that down.

Read the exit terms before you sign

Webflow documents what its code export leaves behind, and the list is longer than most owners expect. CMS content, Ecommerce content and functionality, user accounts and localized pages are excluded; collection lists render their empty state and collection pages show nothing bound to a field; forms and site search stop working; password-protected pages lose their protection (Webflow Help Center). Your marketing pages walk out as static HTML. Your blog and your store stay behind.

Squarespace exports content as a WordPress XML file, with its own gaps. Album, cover, index, info, calendar, portfolio and store pages don't export, page-specific headers and footers aren't included, and features that lean on Squarespace's own CSS and JavaScript don't survive the trip (Squarespace Help Center). Products come out through a separate CSV export (Squarespace Help Center). A custom build has no export step at all, because the repository already belongs to you.

Neither limit is a scandal. Both are the shape of the deal, and they decide how much leverage you keep when the price moves again. One subscriber told TechRadar their Squarespace bill climbed from US$216 to US$348 a year between 2021 and 2026, saying they felt they were "paying for things I sincerely did not ask for, the biggest thing being AI" (TechRadar). One bill proves nothing on its own. The 2026 pattern of two repricings in three months does suggest planning for a third.

The five-minute version

Answer two questions.

Does your site show things or do things? Showing covers pages, photos, hours, contact forms and a blog. Doing covers quoting, bookings with real rules, stock, logins, and anything that reads or writes to a system you already run. Showing points at a platform. Doing points at a custom build, and our guide to how long a build takes in New Zealand explains why that decision moves your launch date more than your budget does.

Then name the person who publishes a change in month seven. If that's you, on a Sunday, choose Squarespace Core. If that's a designer you keep on retainer and design quality is what your site sells on, Webflow Premium fits. If that's a developer or an internal team, a custom build removes the platform sitting between them and the site, and the higher build cost buys back the ceiling.

Then put the accounts in your own name, on any of the three routes. The Squarespace subscription, the Webflow site, the domain and the Stripe account should bill to you and list you as owner, with your agency added as a collaborator. Sorting that on day one costs nothing and keeps a future migration in your hands rather than someone else's.