Wix is the most flexible builder. The bill creeps.

Wix is the most flexible website builder I've used. It's also the easiest one to wreck. I've built or fixed five of them, and I pay for one myself, so this comes from my own billing email, not a demo account.

Ray owns Riverside Lanes, sixteen lanes and a bar, league night on Wednesdays. His nephew built the site years ago on Wix's free plan. Ads across the top and an address that read riversidelanes.wixsite.com/something-long. Ray had that address printed on league flyers. Two hundred of them.

So here's the thing about the free plan. It's real, it lasts forever, and it costs you customers. The ads and that clunky URL make any business look like a kid's lemonade stand. I told Ray flat out: pay for a plan or print new flyers.

What it costs

There's a free plan and four paid ones. Light is $17 a month on annual billing, $24 month to month. No selling allowed at that tier. Core is $29 annually, $36 monthly, and it's the first plan that can take money. Business is $39 annually. Business Elite is $159 monthly billed yearly, $172 monthly billed monthly.

I put Ray on Core. That's $348 a year on my card, reimbursed quarterly, in an envelope that smells like lane oil. Free custom domain for year one, then about $21 to renew a dot-com.

Extra costs pile up quiet. Apps run $3 to $20 a month apiece. Business email through Google is $6 a month per address. Card processing is 2.9% plus 30 cents per sale, same as everybody. And the annual plan renews at the full monthly rate if you let it ride. A guy named Franco commented on a pricing article with two words: "My plan went up." Everyone in the thread knew exactly what he meant.

There's a 14-day money-back window on first payments. Use it before you commit, not after.

What I like, what bites

The editor lets you drop anything anywhere. No grid locking you into rows like Squarespace. The app market has hundreds of options, real ones, from booking to restaurant menus. Storage runs 50GB on Core, 100GB on Business, unlimited on Elite. And the free plan has no time limit, which makes it the best test bench in the business.

Now the bites. Free plan sites carry the ads and the wixsite.com address. Priority phone support only shows up at the $159 Elite tier. Core caps you at 50,000 products, which matters to nobody reading this and somebody somewhere. Storage on Light is 2GB, tight if you shoot video.

And here's the one nobody warns you about. You can't pack up your site and leave. Move to GoDaddy or anywhere else and you rebuild from zero. Wix owns the road out of town.

The kicker: Ray's niece Kayla now updates league standings herself, from her phone, every Wednesday. That's the whole reason this site exists.

The truck bed version

I kept my HVAC service truck organized for twelve years, and I'll tell you the difference between Wix and Squarespace. Squarespace is a toolbox with fitted slots. Everything snaps where it belongs. You can't misplace a wrench.

Wix is a truck bed with the tailgate down. Any tool can go anywhere. Great when you know what you're doing. Bad when the nephew starts "organizing" at midnight and the impact driver ends up under the coil jumper. Somebody still has to keep that bed squared away.

If you're building on it

Build on the free plan until the site looks done. It costs nothing and never expires.
Pay for Core, not Light, the moment you take a single dollar online. Light can't sell.
Pay annually from day one. The monthly rate is about a third higher.
Set a calendar reminder for your renewal date, thirty days out. Check the new price then.
Put one person in charge of edits. Ray learned this after the nephew changed the logo to a bowling pin wearing sunglasses.

Setup took me about eight hours for the lanes, including migrating the flyer address. The standings page took Kayla twenty minutes to learn.

What to do Monday

Open your Wix billing page tonight, whether you use Wix or not, and find your renewal date and next year's price. Write both on your calendar with a reminder a month early. Nobody should get surprised by a bill for their own website.