The short version: Squarespace's Basic plan at $19 a month charges an online store transaction fee of 2% on top of card processing, and a 7% fee on digital content and memberships. Every plan above Basic drops the store fee to 0%: Core is $29 a month, Plus is $49, and Advanced is $99, all billed annually with a 14-day free trial and card rates starting at 2.9% plus $0.30. The consequence is a threshold nobody tells you about at signup: past $500 a month in sales, the 2% costs more than the $10 upgrade to Core. If you are on Basic and selling more than that, you are paying extra for the cheaper plan.
All figures came off Squarespace's own pricing page in July 2026.
It is a percentage Squarespace takes on store sales, charged in addition to whatever your payment processor charges. It is not a processing fee and it does not replace one.
| Plan | Billed annually | Online store fee | Digital content & memberships | Card rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $19/mo | 2% | 7% | from 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Core | $29/mo | 0% | Lower than Basic | from 2.9% + $0.30 |
| Plus | $49/mo | 0% | Lower again | Lower processing fees |
| Advanced | $99/mo | 0% | Lowest | Lowest processing fees |
Squarespace states that annual billing saves up to 36% against monthly, so the figures above are the annual ones, and there is a 14-day free trial on all of them.
The important structural point: the fee exists only to differentiate the tiers. It is not covering a cost. Card processing is largely a pass-through, and a store transaction fee sits on top of it as a pricing lever. That is a completely normal thing for software companies to do, and it is printed on the page rather than hidden. It just means the plan you pick should be decided by your sales volume, not by which number looks smallest.
The plan-picker arithmetic is below. Worth holding next to it: a storefront with no transaction fee at any tier makes the volume math moot, which for a small food seller is sometimes the whole answer.
The gap between Basic and Core is $10 a month. The 2% fee costs $10 once you sell $500 a month. So:
That threshold is low. A vendor selling $125 of cookies a week has already crossed it.
Worked at three volumes, using a $20 average order:
At $2,000 a month, staying on Basic costs you $360 a year for no benefit whatsoever. At $5,000 it is $1,080 a year.
This one catches food sellers more often than you would expect, because a lot of them eventually sell something digital.
On Basic, digital content and memberships carry a 7% fee, not 2%. If you sell a recipe ebook, a sourdough course, a meal-plan PDF, or a paid membership community alongside your physical products, that revenue is charged at 7% on top of processing.
At 7% plus roughly 3% in processing, you are keeping about 90 cents of every dollar on a product with no cost of goods at all. On a $30 course that is $3 in fees before processing. Selling ten a month means $21 a month in transaction fees on digital revenue alone, which on its own is twice the cost of upgrading to Core.
If digital products are any part of your plan, Basic is the wrong tier from day one.
It is worth understanding why the digital rate is higher than the physical one, because it looks arbitrary and is not. Digital products have no cost of goods, no packaging, and no fulfillment, so their margins are dramatically better than a jar of jam's. A platform charging a percentage is, in effect, pricing against your margin rather than against its own cost to serve you, and a 7% fee on a product with 95% margins takes a much smaller share of your profit than 2% does on a product with 30% margins. That reasoning is defensible. It is also completely invisible unless you go looking, and it means the tier that is right for a physical-only seller can be badly wrong the week they add a course.
Run these five in order and the answer usually falls out.
Point two is the one people get wrong most often. A vendor selling $200 a month through winter and $1,800 a month from June to September has an average near $700, but their fee is dominated by four months at $36 each. Averages are the wrong tool for anything charged as a share of revenue. Our guide to pricing food for farmers markets, wholesale and online covers how to build these costs into your prices rather than absorbing them.
Check rather than assume, because it is genuinely easy to be on Basic without remembering choosing it.
Step five is the whole decision. It takes thirty seconds and most people never do it, which is precisely why tiered pricing works.
Worth doing this the moment you read it rather than adding it to a list. The fee is charged continuously and silently, so every month you delay checking is a month you pay it if you are over the line. A vendor at $2,000 a month who takes six months to get around to this has paid $180 for nothing, which is more than the annual difference between the two plans.
No, and it is worth being precise about when it is not.
Stay on Basic if:
Upgrade to Core if:
Consider whether you need Squarespace at all if:
That last group is larger than people admit. Squarespace is an excellent website builder, and a great many food vendors buy it because "you need a website" is the default advice, then discover that what they actually needed was a checkout and a pickup schedule.
Worth knowing before you optimize which tier you are on.
The sales tax point is the one that costs hours rather than dollars. The Federation of Tax Administrators maintains a directory of state tax agencies, and the scale of the obligation becomes obvious the moment you sell into a second state. A platform that calculates a rate has done part of the job. A platform that files and remits has done all of it.
This is the option most people do not consider, and for a lot of vendors it is the right one.
If your Squarespace site earns its keep for brand, story, and search traffic, keep it. Move only the ordering to something built for local selling, and put a link to it from the site. Because there is then no store on Squarespace, the 2% becomes irrelevant and you can drop back to Basic at $19.
The arithmetic works out neatly:
Same cost. But the second option adds pickup scheduling at multiple locations, local delivery with a route, a marketplace listing, and sales tax filed for you, none of which Core includes at any tier.
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 rise or the pickup texts stop, you have your answer. Our full comparison of Homegrown against Squarespace works the trade through, and Squarespace alternatives for food vendors covers the wider field.
Because it is an effective way to price a product for very different customers without publishing ten tiers.
A hobbyist selling $200 a month pays almost nothing in transaction fees and gets a cheap plan. A business selling $10,000 a month either upgrades or pays $200 in fees, and either way the platform captures more from the larger customer. That is rational pricing, and versions of it appear across the whole category: percentage-of-sale platforms, higher card rates on free tiers, features gated one tier up.
Whether it is good for you depends entirely on which side of the threshold you sit. The failure is not being charged a transaction fee. It is not knowing that you are, or not having done the one multiplication that tells you whether to move.
The IRS's guidance on recordkeeping for small businesses is worth a read on keeping these costs itemized, because a transaction fee bundled into a general "fees" category is one you will never notice or question again.
Yes, on the Basic plan: 2% on online store sales and 7% on digital content and memberships, both charged in addition to card processing. Core, Plus, and Advanced have a 0% online store fee.
2% of store sales on Basic. On a $2,000 month that is $40, against a $10 difference between Basic and Core. Digital content and memberships are charged at 7% on Basic.
At $500 a month in store sales, where the 2% fee equals the $10 monthly difference to Core. Above that, upgrading saves money immediately. It is a low bar and most working vendors clear it.
Check your invoice for the exact base, since platforms differ on whether a percentage applies to the item price only or the full order. The safest assumption when budgeting is that it applies to what the customer pays.
Squarespace advertises lower payment processing fees on Plus and Advanced, with rates starting at 2.9% plus $0.30 on Basic and Core. If you are at the volume where a fraction of a point matters, ask Squarespace for the exact rate per tier before upgrading on that basis alone.
No. The store transaction fee is Squarespace's own charge on the sale and is separate from whatever your processor takes. Changing processors does not remove it. Changing plans does.
It is worth it if you need a genuine website: a story page, a portfolio, a blog that brings in search traffic. If what you need is a way to take orders for local pickup, 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 sell more than that in a month and you are on Squarespace Basic, the 2% transaction fee is costing you more than the upgrade would, and you should fix that today regardless of anything else you decide.
Once that is sorted, the larger question is whether the store part of your Squarespace site is worth what it costs at all. If your customers collect locally, the honest comparison is not Basic against Core. It is whether a website builder is the right place for your checkout, and the cheapest way to answer that is to run a real week of orders somewhere built for local selling and see what changes.
