The short version: Squarespace Basic is $19 a month, and it charges an extra 2% online store transaction fee on top of card processing. Core at $29 removes that fee. Both run card payments from 2.9% plus $0.30, and there is a 14-day free trial. Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually or $12.50 monthly, 0% commission, 2.9% plus $0.30, a 7-day trial, and sales tax calculated and remitted in all 50 states. The trap in this comparison is Basic: past about $500 a month in sales, its 2% fee costs more than simply paying the extra $10 for Core. If you are on Squarespace Basic and selling more than that, you are paying for the privilege of a cheaper plan.
All figures below came off Squarespace's own pricing page and Homegrown's signup page in July 2026.
Squarespace is a website builder that added a store. Homegrown is a store that skips the website.
Squarespace sells design. Templates, layout control, a blog, galleries, custom domains, and now AI site tools. The commerce features are real but they sit inside a site-building product, and the product's center of gravity is how your pages look.
Homegrown sells the transaction. There is no page builder to learn. You get a standalone storefront on a link, pickup at each place you sell, delivery with a route, and the tax handled. If you want to control typography, this is the wrong product.
Which means the honest framing is:
The short version of the money: at cottage-food volume the transaction fee difference is small and the subscription difference is not. Run your own numbers in a trial before paying for a website builder you may not need.
Same four disclosures on every plan.
| Homegrown | Squarespace Basic | Squarespace Core | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription | $10/mo billed annually, or $12.50/mo billed monthly | $19/mo billed annually | $29/mo billed annually |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial, nothing charged until day eight | 14-day free trial | 14-day free trial |
| Platform fee | $0, 0% commission | 2% online store transaction fee, plus 7% on digital content and memberships | 0% online store transaction fee |
| Card processing | 2.9% + $0.30 | From 2.9% + $0.30 | From 2.9% + $0.30 |
Squarespace Plus is $49 a month and Advanced is $99, both with the 0% store fee and additional features. Annual billing saves up to 36% against monthly, so the figures above are the annual ones, which is the fair comparison against Homegrown's annual price.
Because the 2% is not a small print detail, it is the whole plan difference.
The gap between Basic and Core is $10 a month. The 2% fee costs you $10 once you sell $500 a month. So:
At $2,000 a month, Basic's 2% is $40, which means you are paying $59 to avoid a $29 plan. That is not a rounding error, it is a 100% overpayment on the software line, and nothing about the plan names tells you it is happening.
Worked properly at $2,000 a month across 100 orders, a $20 average order:
Squarespace Basic
Squarespace Core
Homegrown, billed annually
Against Core the difference is $19 a month, or $228 a year. Against Basic at this volume it is $49 a month, or $588 a year, most of which is a fee you could have avoided by paying more.
If you sell digital content or memberships on Basic, that fee is 7% rather than 2%, which is worth knowing before you put a recipe ebook next to your cookies.
It is worth understanding why a percentage fee on top of processing exists at all. Card processing itself is largely a pass-through: the Federal Reserve publishes average interchange fees by payment card network under Regulation II, and that wholesale cost is most of the 2.9%. A store transaction fee is not covering a cost, it is a pricing lever, and platforms use it to make the entry tier look cheaper than it is. That is not unique to Squarespace and it is not dishonest, since the fee is printed on the pricing page. It just means the plan you pick should be decided by your sales volume rather than by which number looks smallest.
The same logic applies to how you treat these costs at tax time. Subscriptions, transaction fees, and card processing are all ordinary business expenses, which the IRS covers in its guide to business expense resources. Keeping them itemized rather than lumped together also makes it much easier to see, a year later, exactly what your storefront cost you.
To be fair, quite a lot, and none of it is about taking orders.
If your business needs a website in its own right, a story page, a portfolio of custom cakes, a blog that brings in search traffic, Squarespace does that and a storefront does not. That is a legitimate reason to pay more.
That last one is the honest crux. Squarespace is excellent at the thing it is for. Most cottage food vendors do not need that thing, they need a checkout, and they end up building a website because that is the default advice.
It is worth naming what that default costs, because it is rarely the subscription. A vendor who decides they need a website typically spends a weekend choosing a template, another evening writing an About page nobody reads, and a recurring hour every few weeks tinkering with it. Meanwhile the actual bottleneck, that customers cannot easily place an order and arrange a pickup time, goes unfixed because it was never the fun part. Six months later the site looks good and the orders are still arriving as text messages.
None of that is Squarespace's fault. It is a mismatch between the tool people reach for and the problem they actually have. The test that cuts through it is to ask what would change tomorrow if your website disappeared but your ordering link stayed, and then what would change if it were the other way around. For most cottage food businesses the second scenario is much worse than the first, which tells you where the money should go first.
If you already have a Squarespace site you like, the useful question is not whether to replace it. It is whether the store part is earning its keep, and our guide to adding online ordering to an existing market business covers running an ordering link alongside a site you already have.
Our comparison of Squarespace for local food sellers covers where it fits and where vendors outgrow the fit.
For a wider view of what else is available at this price point, our roundup of the best e-commerce platforms for local vendors lines up more options with the same fee disclosure used in the table above.
The honest bound: Homegrown is not a website builder. There is no blog, no page editor, no template gallery, and no way to build an About page the way Squarespace does. You get a standalone storefront with your logo, products, bio, and reviews. If you need a site, you need a site, and this is not one.
Yes, and it is a common and sensible setup. Keep the Squarespace site for your brand, your story, and your search traffic, and put an ordering link on it that goes somewhere built for taking orders.
That costs you both subscriptions, but it also lets you drop from Core back to Basic, since without a store on Squarespace the 2% fee is irrelevant. Basic at $19 plus a $10 storefront is $29, the same as Core alone, and the ordering side gets pickup scheduling, delivery routing, and tax filing that Core does not include.
Before restructuring anything, test whether the ordering experience actually improves. You can put your products on a storefront during a free trial and link to it from your existing site for a week. If orders go up or the pickup texts stop, you have your answer. If nothing changes, you have lost a week and learned that your site was fine.
Basic is $19 a month billed annually but adds a 2% online store transaction fee. Core at $29 removes that fee. Plus is $49 and Advanced is $99. Card processing starts at 2.9% plus $0.30 on all of them, and there is a 14-day free trial.
$10 a month billed annually, or $12.50 billed monthly, with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 card processing. The trial is 7 days and nothing is charged until day eight.
Only under about $500 a month in sales. Above that, the 2% transaction fee costs more than the $10 upgrade to Core, so you end up paying extra for the cheaper plan. Check your monthly sales before choosing a tier.
Homegrown, by $19 a month against Core and by more against Basic once you clear $500 a month. At $2,000 a month in sales, the gap is $228 a year against Core and $588 a year against Basic.
It calculates rates and integrates with tax services, but registering, filing, and remitting are yours. Homegrown calculates, files, and remits in all 50 states, including states that exempt qualifying food.
It has local pickup and delivery options, but not scheduling across several locations with separate hours, and not route planning for deliveries you make yourself. Market vendors usually end up managing that outside the platform.
Not necessarily. Many vendors keep the site for brand and search traffic and move only the ordering. If you do that, you can usually drop to the cheaper Squarespace tier, since the 2% store fee stops mattering when there is no store on it.
If you want a website, Squarespace is a good one and this comparison is not really a contest. If you want to sell food to people who collect it locally, you are buying a page builder to get a checkout, and paying a 2% surcharge for it unless you are on Core or above.
The single most useful thing in this article is the $500 line. If you are on Squarespace Basic and selling more than that, you are losing money to a fee that a $10 upgrade removes, and you should fix that today regardless of what else you decide. Once that is sorted, the real question is whether the store part of your site is worth what it costs, and the cheapest way to answer it is to run a real week of orders somewhere built for them and compare.
