Replace Squarespace.

Squarespace is cheaper and it stays cheaper. If you have the time and the eye for it, Squarespace is the right answer and we will say so. Two things sit against it. Squarespace’s pricing page lists a 2% transaction fee on the entry plan for an online store and 7% on digital content, so if you sell, the subscription is not the whole bill. And US$1,500 buys the work you would otherwise do yourself at 9pm: copy for every page, a brand pass across the site, technical SEO and schema, your Google Business profile connected, no page cap.

A build changes what happens after someone finds you, not how many people find you. What it removes is the reasons a job goes somewhere else: pages that load on a phone, a quote form submitted for real before handover, and the titles, sitemap, structured data and Google Business profile that decide whether you show up when someone searches your trade and your suburb. Analytics and one ad pixel are wired in and tested, so you count enquiries instead of guessing at them. If the phone still doesn’t ring, the website was not your bottleneck.

A custom build does not start from a theme gallery. The layout, the type and the palette are set for your business, and the imagery is generated for your brand and colour matched rather than pulled from a stock library your competitor also buys from. The Agentic AI Site Builder plans are the other lane and work differently, so know which one you are buying: every plan site starts from the same starter layout and is rewritten around your brief. If you want a site that looks like nobody else’s, that is the build.

Nothing goes live until you have approved it in writing. What makes an AI site look like an AI site is generic input: a one-line prompt, stock photos everybody else bought, and copy nobody edited after the first pass. Your build starts from a brief about your business and the copy is written for your pages. We generate imagery for your brand and colour match it, and we do not shoot photography, so if you have real photos of your work, send them.

Partly, and the gap is the point. Squarespace’s support documentation says its export is a single WordPress-format file carrying standard pages and one blog: style settings, custom CSS, store pages and most other page types stay behind, and the file cannot be imported into another Squarespace site. Its pricing page says that if you cancel, “your service will continue through the period you’ve already paid for”. After that you hold the partial export, not the site. Your domain is separate: it moves with you, and we point it only when you say so. What the export drops, we rebuild to the scope set in your brief.

Bringing your Squarespace content across is a US$400 add-on on top of the US$1,500 build, and it is in your quote before you pay rather than billed afterwards. Nothing goes dark in between. We build the replacement first, you approve it, and only then does the domain point at the new site, which is one DNS change we make when you say so. Your Squarespace site keeps answering right up to that moment, and your old links redirect to the new pages.

On a plan, yes, and without calling anyone. You type what you want in plain English, and every change is staged, checked and revertible before it goes live. Credits pay for the work the AI does when you ask it for a change; publishing it is free, however often you do it. Plans are Pro, Ultra and Max: US$39, US$99 and US$199 a month, carrying 1,000, 3,000 and 7,500 credits a month across the sites on your account. Without a plan you hold the source code, which means changes are a developer’s job. That is the honest trade against Squarespace’s editor.

Your domain, your content and your lead data stay yours throughout. On full payment of a build we assign you the copyright in it, so you run, host and change your delivered site anywhere, or have anyone else change it, and cancelling a plan never reaches that. The export is free, there is no exit fee and we never ask why: for a build or a template you bought, the full source as a Next.js codebase, plus your images and their license records; for a site you made with the AI builder, the finished pages and their assets, plus any data your site stores with us. Three things it cannot carry, said now rather than at the door: licensed fonts and stock images come with a license reference rather than a license from us, keys living in our accounts do not travel, and our hosting setup and build tooling stay ours. Standing the site up elsewhere is a developer’s job.

noboringsites is an Australian company, ABN 45 675 551 783, registered for GST and founder-led, with the registered entity and address on the terms page. A build is paid in full at checkout through Stripe, so your card details never reach our servers, and nothing is built before that payment clears. What sits between your money and a bad outcome is the approval gate: every draft is a hosted preview you click through, two written rounds of changes are in the price, and nothing goes public until you sign it off. If we went quiet and nothing arrived, that is a service not supplied within a reasonable time, and the Australian Consumer Law entitles you to a refund; a card payment also leaves your bank’s chargeback route open. Cancel before we start and you get back what you paid less anything already spent; cancel after we start and we keep a fair amount for the work done to that point, and we tell you the figure and how we got to it.

Your dates are set with you at brief, before any work starts, and a launch date we commit to is the rush add-on. What is fixed regardless: your scope and your price are settled in the quiz before you pay, so there is no discovery phase to sit through, two rounds of changes are already in the price, and nothing goes public until you approve it. Your Squarespace site stays live and answering the whole time, so you are never paying while your business is offline.

Hosting, SSL that renews itself and the security headers all sit with noboringsites, and you never touch a server. The headers stop your pages being framed by another site and stop scripts loading from anyone else’s domain, and there is no plugin marketplace bolted on, so there is no plugin layer waiting to be patched. Fair is fair: managed hosting is Squarespace’s real strength too. The difference is that you own the thing being looked after. There is no round-the-clock hotline here: one address, [email protected], and the founder reads it. It is not staffed overnight.