A website builder salesperson has one big advantage: they do not have to lie. Your site really will be live over a weekend, it really will look decent, and it really will take care of itself on mobile. Everything they promise at the start comes true.
The catch is that everything they promise is true about year one. The question nobody asks you sounds different: what happens in year three, when you have twice the products, your own processes, and a competitor who does not look like you? This article is about what a monthly fee buys you, and more importantly what it does not.
Builders are not slow and that is the treacherous part
Let me start with the most common accusation against website builders, which simply is not true. That they are slow. The data says the opposite, and anyone claiming otherwise either has not looked or is selling you something.
A builder is fast precisely because it is identical. A company running hundreds of thousands of near identical sites can afford to tune them once for everyone. The average WordPress with twenty plugins from twenty authors has no such option. The builder wins that round and there is no point pretending otherwise.
The treacherous part is elsewhere. That speed is not yours. It is borrowed, and it behaves exactly like a loan: the moment the platform adds another feature to the template, it loads for you too, whether you use it or not. The median Shopify page weighs 3.77 MB, and Squarespace comes out at 3,974 kB, the heaviest median page of any measured system. You can do nothing about that number. It is not your decision.
Speed you do not control is not an advantage. It is a loan that can be called in at any time
And a platform median tells you nothing about your particular site. When you end up on the slow side of that average, you cannot move it. You open a ticket and you wait.
You are not paying for a website, you are paying rent
This is the heart of it, and most people only realise it when it is too late. On a builder platform you do not own a website. You own an account. The website is a state in somebody else's database that you can reach for as long as you keep paying.
The most honest about this is the Czech builder Mioweb, which writes it directly into its own price list: your site is tied to our platform, and when you stop using the platform, your site ceases to exist.
Your site must run on Wix's servers
Wix says it technically and just as firmly: the site has to run on Wix servers and cannot be exported. This does not mean it is difficult. It means it is not possible at all.
Webnode is the most interesting case, because it draws a line. Shop products and orders can be exported in CSV or XML. Website content cannot. A customer who asked for an export was told by support in May 2026 that exporting data from their editor is not possible and the move would have to be done by hand. When he pointed to the right to data portability under GDPR, he was told that this is website content, not personal data.
What happens when you stop paying is documented too. With Webnode, premium services are blocked for thirty days, then the project drops to the free version and content above the free storage limit is deleted. Shoptet's terms effective from February 2026 set late interest at 0.5 % of the outstanding amount per day, reminder fees of 200 and 350 CZK, and a deadline for deleting your data after termination: ninety days at the latest. Backing up is your duty, not theirs.
A template is a suit tailored to a thousand companies at once
Shoptet has seven actively supported templates. Behind them stand roughly forty four thousand shops across Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary. The maths is simple: thousands of shops share one look and differ by a logo and a button colour.
Wix is tighter still. Its help centre states that you cannot switch to a different template on a site you have already created. A decision you made in ten minutes at the beginning stays with you until you rebuild the whole site.
A template does not sell your company. It sells one designer's ability to think about a thousand companies at once
Your customer will not remember which platform you run on. But they will notice when they see the same layout, the same icons and the same checkout for the third time that day. And a company that looks like everyone else has a harder time defending a price higher than everyone else's.
The ceiling you discover halfway through
A builder is never sold on what it cannot do. Which is exactly what you should check first, because a company's demands grow and a platform's limits do not.
With Webnode specifically: custom CSS cannot be edited directly, support itself states that changes are only possible through inserted HTML, and does not guarantee they will survive the next editor update. Inserting custom code into the page head requires the Standard plan or higher. There is no editor for robots.txt, you have to write to support. Structured data is added indirectly through Google Tag Manager. A 301 redirect is set page by page as an alternative address, not through a redirect manager.
Builder: redirects entered one address at a time, robots.txt handled by support, structured data only through a third party tool.
Custom site: a redirect map in one place, robots.txt is a file in the project, structured data generated from the same data the visitor sees.
Shoptet is better here, custom CSS and HTML can be added. What you cannot change is the structure of the admin, the checkout steps, the discount logic or the way search works. Squarespace, in turn, will not include your shop, your style settings or your custom CSS in an export.
So the ceiling is not about what you need today. It is about what you will need once things start going well: a link to your warehouse system, a custom price calculator, a different ordering process for wholesale, an enquiry form that asks different questions depending on what the visitor picked. The answer is always the same one sentence: the platform cannot do that.
A price that grows with you and mostly without you
Builders sell on a low entry price. The real number is never the one in the advert.
Webnode advertises its Standard plan at 209 CZK a month. That is the rate when you pay a year upfront. Pay monthly and it is 359 CZK, which is 72 % more over a year. Add the domain: Webnode charges 499 CZK excluding VAT a year for a .cz domain, renewals included.
A .cz domain at Webnode: 499 CZK excluding VAT a year, every year.
The same domain at a normal registrar: 145 to 199 CZK. The difference is the margin for not having to think about it.
With Shoptet the price rises can be documented harder, because the prices sit in the contractual terms. Put the version effective from February 2023 next to the one effective from February 2026.
The same change raised late payment interest fivefold, from 0.1 % to 0.5 % per day, and reminder fees from 100 to 200 and from 200 to 350 CZK. In fairness, the other side: disk space per plan genuinely grew and Shoptet added features over those three years. What is telling is something else. The official announcement about the plan changes on the Shoptet blog does not state a single new price. It talks about features.
Here is what a five year total looks like when you count more than the advert. Figures exclude VAT and are current today.
| Item | Webnode Standard | Shoptet Business | Custom website |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront | 0 CZK | 4,990 CZK for a template | 30,000 CZK for a company site |
| Plan per year | 2,508 CZK | 16,092 CZK (annual discount) | 0 CZK |
| Running cost per year | 499 CZK domain | 12,000 CZK for five add-ons | 4,800 CZK hosting and 300 CZK domain |
| Five year total | 15,035 CZK | 145,450 CZK | 55,500 CZK |
| What you hold after five years | An account you keep paying for. Content cannot be exported | An account and data you cannot fully take with you | The site, the code and the data are yours. Hosting can move |
That table also shows something that does not suit me as a supplier, but it is true: for a simple brochure site Webnode is significantly cheaper and will still be cheaper in five years. If you need three pages with an address and opening hours and nothing more, build it there. With a shop, though, the ratio flips, and it flips fast.
Online shops: where it gets expensive fastest
Shoptet has a line in its price list that deserves credit, because it is true and not a given in this industry: you pay only to rent the shop, nobody will ask you for a share of your turnover. There genuinely is no revenue commission.
The commission arrives through another door. The Shoptet Pay payment gateway ties its rate to your plan: from 1.99 % plus 2.80 CZK per transaction on the free plan down to 1.19 % plus 1.90 CZK on Enterprise. The cheaper your plan, the more you pay on every single order. So the cheaper plan is not cheaper, it is expensive in a different place.
Then the add-ons. The catalogue holds around four hundred and the useful ones mostly cost 100 to 400 CZK a month each: filters, back in stock alerts, product reviews, loyalty discounts, accounting connectors. Five of those is twelve thousand a year, close to a second annual plan fee. A custom template from an agency then runs from 25,000 to 150,000 CZK, which is the price of a custom site.
On the international platforms, watch these. Squarespace charges a 2 % transaction fee on its entry plan, and rates up to 7 % on digital content and member areas. Shopify adds a 2 % fee if you do not use its own payment gateway, which is exactly the situation anyone ends up in when they want to offer local customers the payment methods they are used to.
A builder does not want a share of your turnover. It wants it from the plan, the gateway and the add-ons
What you get to take with you when you leave
Here is a test you can run this afternoon that tells you more about a platform than its entire website. Try to export everything.
From Shoptet you can export products, orders, customers and invoices. You cannot export customer passwords, they are hashed, so after a move everyone has to set a new one. Exports are also generated only in the shop's main language, so a multilingual shop leaves one language lighter.
The most telling detail is this: Shoptet publishes detailed official guides on migrating to it from ByznysWeb, Shop5, Eshop-rychle and WooCommerce. There is no official guide on migrating away from it. That is not an oversight, it is a product decision.
With Wix, leaving is even simpler to describe: the site does not move. With Squarespace you get a single XML file for WordPress that will not contain your shop, will not contain more than one blog page, will not contain video, and will not contain your style settings or custom CSS.
The most expensive day in the life of a builder website is the day you decide to leave it
Who actually decides about your website
One more thing that almost never comes up in these discussions, and which matters from a business point of view. Who is on the other side of the contract.
Webnode was ninety percent acquired by the Belgian group team.blue in December 2020. In September 2025 the same group acquired Shoptet. The two best known Czech builders now belong to one foreign hosting conglomerate that has been buying up European companies one after another.
This is not a scandal and it is not an accusation, it is ordinary business. But it has a practical consequence: the price list, which features survive, and how long the platform exists at all are decided by a financial group for whom your website is one line in a spreadsheet. When they decide to raise prices or wind a product down, you find out by email.
Search and AI: the ceiling moved, it did not disappear
Google's search documentation, updated in December 2025, states that Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems. At the same time Google tempers expectations: it is not a single signal and relevant content wins even with a worse page experience. Both are true at once.
There is a lot of fear being sold around AI search, so here are two numbers that cool it down. An analysis of more than fifty thousand websites found that language models and AI search engines drove less than 0.15 % of all visits in 2025. Organic search drove 16 %. That layer is growing fast, but for now it is a crumb.
The second number is more of a warning. When an AI summary appears in the results, 8 % of visits produce a click on a link, against the usual 15 %. Search is slowly turning from a route to your site into a destination of its own.
So what should you actually do? Far less than agencies are selling. Google explicitly states that no additional requirements or special optimisations are needed to appear in AI answers, and that no special structured data is required. What is documented is duller: none of the major AI crawlers execute JavaScript. They read what the server hands them as finished HTML.
In fairness, most builders do serve HTML from the server, so that particular condition is met. What you do not have is control over the rest: over the clutter added to the page, over robots.txt, over what your structured data looks like, and over how fast you can react when the rules change in six months. On a custom site that is half a day of work. On a builder it is a ticket and a wait to see whether the platform considers it at all.
When a builder is enough and is the right call
So this does not read as a pamphlet: website builders are not bad products. They are well built, and in some situations there is no point overpaying for something custom.
- You need three pages with contact details and opening hours and nothing will change
- You are testing an idea and want to know whether anyone wants it before spending real money
- The budget is genuinely small and the choice is between a builder and no website
- It is a temporary page for an event that ends in three months
- You are starting with twenty products and want to find out whether they sell
In all those cases a builder is the sensible and cheaper choice. Just keep a record of everything you put in there, and assume that one day you will be retyping it by hand.
What a custom website does differently
A custom website is not better because it looks nicer. Plenty of templates look nice. It is different in who holds the keys.
- The code, the content and the database are yours. The domain is registered in your name, not your supplier's
- The admin contains exactly the fields this site needs, so swapping a photo takes ten seconds and there is nothing to break
- Speed is a decision, not a lottery. The page does not load clutter for features you do not have
- The site connects to what already runs in your company: stock, accounting, attendance, price lists
- The build price is one off and the running cost is a known number nobody raises by thirty percent
- When search rules change in two years, it is fixed in half a day rather than through a ticket
And the other side, honestly: a custom site costs more upfront, takes weeks instead of a weekend, and ties you to the person or company that built it. So ask two questions before you sign. Whether you get access to the code, and whether the site is built so somebody else could take it over. If both answers are yes, that is not lock-in, that is just a supplier.
What to do about it this week
- 1Add up what the website has cost over the last three years including the plan, add-ons, template and domain. Almost nobody knows this number and almost everybody is surprised by it.
- 2Try to export absolutely everything: products, articles, customers, images, page texts. Whatever refuses to export is exactly what you will lose one day.
- 3Write down three things the site must do within two years and ask the platform's support whether it can. Get the answer in writing.
- 4Measure the site in PageSpeed Insights and walk through it on a phone as a customer who does not know you. That tells you more than any report.
If it turns out the builder serves you and you want nothing more from it, leave it alone. If it turns out you are paying rent for a ceiling you have already hit, you know what to do.
Frequently asked questions
Are Webnode and Shoptet bad platforms?
No. They are well built products that do exactly what they promise, and they score better on Core Web Vitals than the average WordPress. The problem is not quality but three other things: a ceiling that cannot be moved, data that cannot be fully exported, and a price that rises over time without your say.
When is it worth moving from a website builder to a custom site?
The moment you first hear the sentence the platform cannot do that about something your business genuinely needs. The second reliable signal is cost: once the annual total of plan plus add-ons passes roughly 25,000 CZK, five years will cost you more than a custom site and you will still own nothing.
Can I take my site from Webnode or Wix somewhere else?
Not the site content. Wix states in its help centre that a site must run on its servers and cannot be exported. Webnode allows exports of shop products and orders in CSV and XML, but according to its support the page content cannot be exported. In that case texts and structure are rebuilt by hand.
Does Shoptet take a share of turnover?
No, there is no revenue commission in its price list, and that is fair. It is charged elsewhere: the Shoptet Pay gateway rate depends on your plan, from 1.99 % plus 2.80 CZK on the free plan to 1.19 % plus 1.90 CZK on Enterprise. Add-ons come on top, usually 100 to 400 CZK a month each.
Is a custom website more expensive to run?
Usually the opposite. Running a custom site including the server, daily backups and the certificate costs around 400 CZK a month, with the domain at 300 CZK a year, because you pay actual costs rather than a plan. The difference is in the one off build price, not the monthly payments.
What does a custom website cost?
A one page site from 15,000 CZK, a company website with several pages and an admin from 30,000 CZK, a site with custom features from 50,000 CZK. Shops and applications are quoted by scope. Prices exclude VAT and are build prices, not monthly fees.