Part 4 | Best website builder for maker-led in-person workshops: Costs, Fees, & Final Verdict

If you're just joining us, welcome to Part 4, the last installment of our 4-part series reviewing the core features of a website builder for workshops, classes, and courses! If you'd like to catch up and meet the studio owner we're finding a new platform for, head over to the introduction here.

Parts 1 through 3 covered booking classes & ticketing, loyalty programs & email marketing, and daily operations, platform by platform. This part covers the actual cost, and then my own take on where each of these four fits best. 

The sticker price

Shopify looks cheapest on the surfance: $29/month for Basic, billed annually. Squarespace actually undercuts it at the very bottom, $19/month for Basic, but its plans climb fast from there, up to $99/month for Advanced, and most features we've been discussing require at least the $29/month Core subscription. Wix sits in the middle at $39/month for Business. Square is the most expensive sticker price of the four at $49/month.

Transaction fees tell a slightly different story. Online, all four land close to the same base rate, right around 2.9% plus 30 cents, though Shopify's actually scales down as you move up its plan tiers. Where they really split is on premium cards: Square adds nothing extra, Shopify tacks on 3.5% plus 30 cents, and Wix is the priciest of the three at 3.7% plus 30 cents. In person, all four are close enough to call a wash, somewhere around 2.5% plus a small per-transaction fee.

Squarespace has a wrinkle none of the other three do: a separate "platform commerce fee", stacked on top of normal card processing and scaled by plan. On the cheapest Basic tier, that's 2% on physical sales and whopping 7% on digital products or memberships. It only fully disappears on the $99/month Advanced plan. If you're planning to sell any digital product on Squarespace, worth knowing that a lower-tier plan takes a much bigger precentage out of exactly that kind of sale.

What actually adds up

Sticker price is where most people stop looking, and it's exactly why "just use Shopify" ends up being the default: cheapest number on the page. But after reading the last three parts of this series, I hope you starting to see how Shopify's sticker price isn't the whole story.

Add up what a real workshop-and-retail business actually needs, and the math shifts. On Shopify, staff access alone pushes you off the $29/month Basic plan and onto the $79/month Grow plan the moment you want to give anyone else a login. Loyalty means Smile.io, $15 to $79 a month depending on how far you want to take it. Real point-of-sale functionality is another $89 a month per location. None of that shows up on the first page you look at, though.

Squarespace tells a similar story from a different angle: a cheap sticker price, then Acuity Scheduling at $20 to $34 a month the moment you need real booking and deposits, and Offerwhere at $40 to $373 a month for loyalty, the steepest of any option in this whole series, with no free tier at any level. Not to mention email marketing, which will tack on another $20/month for up to 5,000 sends. 

Square and Wix both keep more of this bundled into what you're already paying. Square's loyalty and email are baked into its base subscription, no separate line item. Wix's loyalty is native too, though the good stuff, tiers and point expiration, needs its $39/month Business plan rather than Core. Neither one disappears the extra cost entirely, they just fold more of it into the number you already budgeted for. Note that Wix's email marketing is not include either, and you're adding on another $24–$29/month. Square is truly the only one that includes everything except the digital product automations.

So which one is it

I'll actually land on this now, since after four parts of trade-offs you've earned a straight answer.

If your business runs mostly on workshops, classes, and bookings, and retail is more of a side channel, I'd point you toward Wix or Square. Both treat booking, deposits, and loyalty as real, native parts of the platform instead of something you go build yourself, and that's the part of your business that actually needs the strongest functionality.

If you're mostly ecommerce, shipping product is most of your revenue, and workshops are something you run on the side, Squarespace or Shopify make more sense, even knowing their booking and loyalty tools are the weaker link. You'd be trading a smoother workshop experience for stronger footing on the side of the business with a larger revenue stream.

Neither answer is the "right" one in the abstract. It's just about which side of your business needs the platform to carry more weight.

Where to go from here

That's the whole series: the real question to ask instead of defaulting to whatever's most recommended, then the specifics on booking, retention, operations, and now the actual cost. If you want to walk through this against your own numbers instead of mine, the worksheet below scores all four platforms against what actually matters to your business, so you land on your own answer instead of just mine.

[Download the worksheet]

And if you're still patching two (or more, no judgement here!) platforms together by hand the way our studio owner was, you don't have to keep doing that. Start exploring if one of these already fits how your business runs, and stop forcing the round peg into the square hole every single week.