Twelve Years, $1,687, and a 122% Price Hike: I'm Done With Squarespace
I’m done with Squarespace.
I've paid Squarespace every year since 2014. Same site, same usage, same nothing-has-changed account the entire time. My bill went from $86.40 to $192.00 — a 122% increase — for a total of $1,686.90 handed over across twelve renewals. That's a compounded growth rate of roughly 6.9% a year, every year, for a product that did not grow with me once.
This isn't a slow, honest climb. It's a script: hold the price flat long enough that you stop paying attention, then jump it 35% in a single cycle, then do it again. My bill dropped exactly once in twelve years, in 2025. Squarespace erased that "relief" the very next renewal and charged me more than ever. Once the number goes up, it does not come back down. That's not inflation. That's a company that found the exact ceiling of what a loyal customer will tolerate without canceling, and started pricing right up against it.
I'm Not the Only One They're Doing This To
Squarespace just pushed increases of up to 26% across Basic, Core, Plus, and Advanced plans, and didn't bother explaining why beyond a quiet email to affected customers (PetaPixel).
Go look at r/squarespace right now. There's a thread with 168 upvotes and 100+ comments of customers describing this exact same pattern: a five-year climb to what one person flatly calls "outright exploitation," bills pushing toward $350 a year for sites that haven't been touched, and people pointing out — correctly — that they're being billed for AI tools they never asked for and never open (Reddit). One commenter's entire site is a single code block per page. They're still eating double-digit increases. That's not a pricing model. That's a company that stopped seeing you as a customer and started seeing you as a line item.
The Playbook, Since They Won't Say It Out Loud
They gate what used to be normal. Features that were fine on a personal plan last year get walled off behind a pricier tier this year — not because the feature changed, but because the invoice needed to go up.
They make you fund things you'll never use. AI writing tools, AI design tools, expanded commerce features — paid for by raising your rate whether you touch any of it or not.
They don't explain themselves. No public memo, no honest pricing page, just an email that shows up telling you the number changed. That's not communication. That's hoping you won't ask questions.
Stop Funding This. Leave.
If any of this matches your own billing history, stop assuming it's "just a few dollars a year" and actually add it up. Pull every invoice you've got and do the math the way I did above. Most people are paying more than double what they started at and have never once looked hard enough to notice.
Then do something about it:
Run the numbers on your own account. Total spend, year-over-year change, all of it. Know exactly what you've handed over.
Post your numbers. Comment, share, put it on your own site. The more of these are public, the harder it gets for this to stay quiet and easy for them.
Actually leave, or price out leaving. Even getting a real quote elsewhere gives you leverage you don't have while you're just quietly paying the renewal.
If you make the jump, say where you landed. This shouldn't just be a Reddit thread and a couple of angry blog posts — it should be customers actually walking.
Where I'm Going Instead
None of these companies are your friend either, but every one of them beats getting hiked on year after year for a product that never changes:
WordPress.org (self-hosted, on Bluehost, SiteGround, or WP Engine) — you own the content and the code outright. No platform can hold your site hostage on a pricing page, and hosting costs less than Squarespace does now.
Webflow — real design control, and code you can export if you ever want to leave them too.
Ghost — built for writers and newsletters, with pricing tiers that are actually published and don't move under you.
Framer — fast, modern, and the free tier is actually usable, not a bait plan.
Carrd — if your site is simple, this costs about $19 a year. That's the whole bill.
Pixpa — built for photographers and creatives, 0% commission on sales, and pricing that doesn't shift every renewal (Pixpa).
How to Actually Get Your Site Off Squarespace
They don't make this easy. That's the entire point of lock-in. Do it anyway:
Export what they'll let you export.Settings → Advanced → Import/Export → Export, then pick WordPress. You get an XML file with your blog posts and pages (Squarespace Help Center). It does not export your layout, custom code blocks, or forms. Don't expect it to.
Manually save everything else before you touch anything. Copy your page text, save custom CSS and code injections, screenshot galleries and layouts, write down your form fields. Do this first.
Deal with your domain before anything else moves. If Squarespace is your registrar, either unlock it and grab the authorization code to transfer it fully, or just repoint the nameservers to your new host and leave registration where it is. Repointing is faster. Transferring means Squarespace never touches it again.
Build the new site and import your content. On WordPress that's Tools → Import → WordPress Importer, upload the XML, assign attachments. Your navigation, homepage layout, and forms will not transfer. Rebuild them yourself.
Set up 301 redirects for any URL that changes shape, so search rankings and old links don't die on the way out.
Test the new site fully before you flip DNS. Use a staging URL or temporary subdomain. Catch broken images and dead links while the old site is still live and working.
Cancel Squarespace only after the new site is live, verified, and DNS has fully propagated — usually 24-48 hours. Cancel too early and you can lose access to your own content mid-move.
It's a weekend of work. Compare that to what you've already handed them, and it's the cheapest weekend you'll spend this year.
A Moment for Pause
“Reward" and "unchecked accumulation" are different things. At some scale, private control of civilizational infrastructure stops being a success story and starts being a governance problem.
This week, SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share — a $1.77 trillion valuation, the largest public offering in history, raising $75 billion in a single day. Hot on its heels, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation and is targeting a public listing before year's end. OpenAI is eyeing a $1 trillion IPO that could dwarf even that. Together, these three companies are valued at approaching $4 trillion and are expected to raise a combined $200 billion from public markets.
“The question of who they’re accountable to — and who shares in what they build — is one we can no longer afford to treat as secondary.”
What these companies have actually built is genuinely staggering. SpaceX has done what most aerospace engineers once thought impossible — repeatedly landing orbital rockets, building global satellite internet from scratch, and seriously advancing humanity's capacity to become a multi-planetary species. Anthropic and OpenAI have compressed decades of AI research into just a few years, producing tools that are already reshaping medicine, scientific discovery, education, and the nature of knowledge work itself.
These are not incremental achievements. They are civilizational.
And yet.
Elon Musk's net worth crossed $970 billion today — largely on the back of his ~42% SpaceX stake — making him the world's first trillionaire. A single early investor holds a ~$68 billion position in SpaceX alone. Anthropic's seven founders each saw their personal stakes hit roughly $8 billion in a single day — the largest single-day addition of billionaires from one company in Bloomberg Billionaires Index history. The combined net worth of founders and major shareholders of just five AI-adjacent companies grew by approximately $1.2 trillion between January 2024 and early 2026 — a wealth accumulation rate exceeding any previous period in history, including the original Gilded Age.
None of this happened in a vacuum. These companies were built on publicly funded university research, decades of government contracts, tax-subsidized infrastructure, and the intellectual labor of tens of thousands of people who will see a fraction of this wealth.
Which brings me to a harder question.
Should wealth of this magnitude — generated at this speed, from technology this foundational — be governed primarily by shareholder value? Or have these companies crossed a threshold where they're better understood as public goods?
““Reward” and “unchecked accumulation” are different things. At some scale, private control of civilizational infrastructure stops being a success story and starts being a governance problem.”
It's worth noting that both OpenAI and Anthropic incorporated as Public Benefit Corporations, a structure that legally requires directors to balance profit with broader social benefit. OpenAI's stated public purpose is literally "to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Anthropic's founders have pledged to donate 80% of their personal wealth. These are meaningful commitments — and they deserve credit for making them. But a pledge is not a policy. And a PBC filing doesn't automatically determine how value flows when a company is worth a trillion dollars.
AI models are fast becoming what roads, electrical grids, and telecommunications networks once were — essential infrastructure that underpins nearly every economic and civic activity. Space-based internet is already providing global connectivity that governments couldn't build. When infrastructure reaches this level of ubiquity and dependency, economists and legal scholars increasingly argue that the standard shareholder-primacy model breaks down. Not because the founders don't deserve reward — they do — but because the implicit social contract that makes these companies possible demands something in return.
The questions worth sitting with:
If AI becomes as essential as electricity, should access to it be treated as a utility — regulated, universally available, and priced accordingly?
If these companies were built on publicly funded research and government subsidies, what does society have a legitimate claim to in return?
Is there a point at which a single individual holding $970 billion — while the infrastructure that created it relied on public institutions — represents a structural failure of how we distribute the gains of innovation?
I don't think the answer is to punish ambition or penalize risk-taking. The founders of these companies took extraordinary bets on ideas most institutions wouldn't touch. That deserves real reward.
But "reward" and "unchecked accumulation" are different things. At some scale, private control of civilizational infrastructure stops being a success story and starts being a governance problem.
We are at that scale now.
These are remarkable institutions doing genuinely important work.
The question of who they're accountable to — and who shares in what they build — is one we can no longer afford to treat as secondary.
Schneider Electric Repositions to an Energy Technology Partner
With nearly two centuries of innovation and partnership behind us, we’re building the foundations for what comes next — cleaner, smarter, and more resilient energy for all.
From Background Utility to Strategic Advantage
Global energy demand is accelerating — projected to rise 60% within the next 15 years as AI, automation, and connected devices expand everywhere. The grid is straining under this growth, and energy has become one of the most dynamic and disruptive forces reshaping every industry.
Price volatility and supply instability are no longer temporary concerns. They’re rewriting business strategies, forcing new thinking around resilience, investment, and operational planning. At the same time, electrification is transforming every sector — from homes adopting heat pumps to industries shifting to electric processes and transportation going all-electric.
Renewable generation is rising fast too. Solar and wind are leading the global growth story, bringing clean power but also new complexity. Managing intermittency and ensuring grid stability now depend on smarter, more connected energy systems.
Turning change into opportunity
At Schneider Electric, we don’t just adapt to these changes — we enable them. Together with our partners, we’re driving the transition from traditional energy dependency to intelligent, software-defined energy technology.
Data centers: As digital infrastructure expands, Schneider solutions are powering sustainable, autonomous operations — from hyperscale to edge — through innovations in liquid cooling and AI-driven power management.
Buildings and homes: Smart systems like the SpaceLogic Room Controller turn passive spaces into active energy producers, using embedded analytics to optimize HVAC performance and cut energy waste.
Grids and infrastructure: IoT-enabled platforms and AI microgrid advisors equip utilities and operators to balance supply, cut carbon intensity, and boost resilience.
Industry: With software-defined automation, manufacturers can respond to disruption in real time — keeping efficiency, continuity, and sustainability at the core of every process.
Energy technology is Schneider’s domain — one we’ve been shaping for decades. Now, with our partners, we’re scaling it to define the next chapter.
Innovation in motion
For nearly 200 years, Schneider has thrived by anticipating and enabling what’s next. Our innovation engine drives this momentum: over 1,400 patent applications last year alone. Today, our technologies power over one million buildings, 40% of the world’s hospitals, and much of the infrastructure behind leading cloud providers.
No other company offers our combination of real-time energy control, scalable software, and digital services — spanning from the electrical grid to the production line. And through our partner ecosystem, that impact scales even further.
Making the energy transition actionable
Our EcoStruxure platform connects technologies, data, and people across every level of enterprise. By combining connected products, edge control, and advanced digital services, EcoStruxure turns complexity into opportunity — strengthening safety, efficiency, sustainability, and uptime.
Through open architecture and interoperability, EcoStruxure is more than a technology stack — it’s a system of systems. Together with our partners, we build ecosystems where innovation flows across networks, supply chains, and industries.
Our global partner ecosystem includes over one million professionals — contractors, integrators, distributors, and innovators — all accelerating the digital energy revolution. With SE Ventures, our $1B+ venture fund, we’re also backing startups driving sustainable progress where it’s needed most.
Purpose and impact
Sustainability is woven into every part of how Schneider and our partners operate. Our Net-Zero target is validated by the Science Based Targets initiative, and since 2017, we’ve cut our own scope 1 and 2 emissions by 75%. Programs like the Zero Carbon Project and Materialize extend this impact across our supplier and customer ecosystems.
Our recognition as the World’s Most Sustainable Company by TIME and Statista underscores what drives us — measurable progress and shared purpose.
Partnering for the future
The energy landscape is transforming faster than ever. But at Schneider and across our partner community, we see that as opportunity. With nearly two centuries of innovation and partnership behind us, we’re building the foundations for what comes next — cleaner, smarter, and more resilient energy for all.