Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute. And today we're talking about the financial trap door, built into those, build your website for free. ads. Yeah, we're going to talk about why that attractive $0 price tag might actually be the most expensive mistake you make for your business all year. It really is the ultimate bait and switch. We've taken a deep dive into the source material, the contracts, the hidden fee structures, and the real world experiences from local business owners right here. And we want to show you exactly what is hiding in that fine print. Our mission today is to unpack the total cost of ownership for platforms like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace. Because when you factor in the hidden fees, the lost time, and especially the legal risks. Which are huge right now. Huge, especially here in California. That $0 price tag will suddenly skyrockets. OK, so where do we start? We need to start right where the business credibility breaks down. The reason these platforms can even offer a free plan is, well, it's simple. They have to make money somehow. They have to monetize somehow. And they do it by actively undermining your authority and your brand. Let's unpack that. That credibility hit. The second you sign up for a free tier, you inherit their advertising. Yep. You get that massive banner right across the top of your site. You just say something like, this site was built with Wix. Or a footer ad promoting Square, or Weebly. Think about the optics of that for a minute. You're a professional plumber in SLO. Or a respected accountant in Nippomo. A great local winery in a rollo grande. Right. Your website is your storefront. And you basically got a digital billboard on top of that storefront advertising your landlord. It sends such a terrible subconscious message. The source material we looked at highlights this really critical statistic. Yeah, the 75% one. 75% of consumers judge a business's trustworthiness based on its website design. And if a visitor lands on your page and sees that big, bright ad for the platform you used,
[2:01]
the immediate thought is, this business couldn't afford $10 a month for a professional site. It just creates an immediate wall of doubt. And that bad impression, it just gets worse when we look at the domain trap. The domain trap. OK, so if you stay on the free plan, you get that long, awkward, and totally unmemorable, so domain address. You're business.wixi.com. Or we believe your bakery or something. That's so unprofessional. It's a non starter for a serious business. If you want a clean professional address that people can actually remember, and type, you're business.com-2, you have to upgrade. To a paid plan immediately. Immediately. Plus, you have to pay the annual domain fees. This is where they make their first real money off of you. And here's where the fine print gets tricky, right? The ads you see are always for the first year. It's promotional pricing. Always. You might grab a domain for $1 or even free for the first year. But you have to watch that renewal fee. Exactly. Those prices jump significantly, often straight up to $15 or $20 a year. And that's just for the address itself. And if you're a small business owner, you also need to factor in privacy, which almost no one thinks about upfront. Privacy? What are we talking about there? We're talking about the WHOIS database. When you register a domain, your personal contact information, your name, phone number, maybe even your home address. Right. What? It's legally required to be public unless you pay for domain privacy. So if I sign up for a free or cheap domain, my personal info could be publicly searchable by spammers unless I pay extra. That's it, exactly. And that privacy feature is almost always an additional charge, another $10 to $20 a year. Wow. So before you've even built anything, your free website is already costing you $30 to $40 a year. At a minimum, just to look professional and keep your personal life private. You can't escape it. You want to be taken seriously. OK, so we've paid for the domain. We've paid for privacy. And we still have those ugly ads.
[4:03]
Still got them. The hidden costs are already piling up. But here's where the true business functionality comes in. Everything useful is locked behind a paywall. The free plans are essentially bait. There are a demo to get you invested in the template, the drag and drop experience. And once you realize you need actual tools to grow, that's when they hit you with the upgrade wall. So what are the absolute must-have tools that are always locked away? Well, removing the platform ads, obviously. But also anything related to measurement or growth. So analytics. Meaningful analytics, yeah. Seeing who is visiting your site and where they're coming from, and access to essential SEO tools. Which is critical for local businesses here in the 805 area. Absolutely. If Google can't figure out what your website is about, you are not showing up in Google Maps when someone searches bakery near me. And one of the biggest upgrade costs I'm guessing is for e-commerce. Oh, if you sell anything online, the costs become astronomical, and they do it very quickly. So give us an example. OK, take Squarespace. If you want to start selling products, their basic e-commerce plan starts around $23 a month. OK. But here's the critical detail that most people miss. The fine print. The fine print. On that plan, they charge an additional 3% transaction fee on every single sale you make. Hold on. That's 3% on top of what Visa or MasterCard is already charging me. Precisely. You are paying your bank processor. They're 2.9% whatever is. And you're paying the website builder another 3%. So if you have a busy month, say, 10,000 and online sales, that 3% fee alone cost you $300 just to the platform. On top of your monthly fee and your standard processing fees. $300 just to Squarespace. And you're still packing and shipping everything yourself. And to get rid of that 3% fee, you have to upgrade to an even higher cost plan. That pushes your monthly website bill well-passed $40 or $50. So you started it free. And now you're looking at $500, $600 a year just for basic e-commerce.
[6:05]
And you're still doing all the heavy lifting yourself. And that heavy lifting brings us to maybe the most overlooked cost of a free website. Your time, this is the opportunity cost. This is absolutely critical for small business owners here in SLO County, where time is just. It's everything. You're the owner, the operator, the chief, everything officer. Every hour you spend fighting with your website is an hour you are not serving a client or earning income. Exactly. Think about that DIY commitment. It's the time spent trying to learn the platform, figuring out why your image looks blurry on mobile, or watching late night YouTube tutorials just to get a contact form to work. We've all been there. We have. Yeah. And the industry estimates are pretty sobering. Even for a basic site, a DIY bill takes at least 20 to 40 hours of focused effort. And if you add e-commerce or booking tools, it can easily exceed 100 hours. Let's put that into dollar terms. If you're a skilled professional and you value your trade value at just $50 an hour, which is conservative for many trades. Spending 40 hours on a free builder means that site just cost you $2,000 in lost income. And if your time is worth $100 an hour, that's a $4,000 expense. That's money you never earned because you're playing amateur web developer. Instead of being a professional in your actual field and that time cost, it doesn't just stop when you launch the site, does it? Not at all. Free platforms need ongoing maintenance, updates, break things, security patches need to be applied, content needs refreshing. You are perpetually on the clock. It's death by 1,000 time sinks. And speaking of lost money, let's talk about the customers you lose when your site is slow, because these free builders are notoriously slow. They are. And for a fundamental reason. They have to load huge amounts of extra code, all the drag and drop stuff, even for a simple visitor. Plus, they stack thousands of free users on decrowded, cheap servers. So the pages just load slowly for five seconds or more?
[8:06]
And in today's world, four seconds is an eternity. Someone searching for a service locally, they're just impatient. The conversion stats on this are pretty shocking. They are staggering. A site that loads in just one second has a conversion rate five times higher than a site that takes 10 seconds. Imagine five customers walking into your Pismo Beak store versus only one making it through the door because the other four got tired of waiting. That is the perfect real world equivalent. And for e-commerce, it's even worse. While one second site converts two and a half times better than a five second site, you are literally losing sales every second it takes to load. And you probably don't get a second chance with that customer. The statistics are clear. 79% of shoppers who have a bad experience with site performance say they will not return. And 57% won't even recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site. In a small word of mouth community like ours, that's an active reputation killer. It absolutely is. OK, so we've covered fees, time, and loss revenue. Now, lift pivot to the cost that is potentially the most catastrophic, especially here in California. The accessibility lawsuit risk. This is the one that really scares me. This is the risk that turns an inexpensive website into a five-figure headache. We're talking about ADA website accessibility lawsuits. They target sites that aren't accessible to people with disabilities. Like a screen reader can't navigate your menu or an image is missing a text description. Exactly. And these lawsuits are just, they're on the rise nationally. Exponentially from what I've seen. In the first half of 2025 alone, over 2,000 of these lawsuits were filed across the country. That's a 37% increase from the year before. And California always seems to lead the way on these things. We do. We rank number three in the entire country. 380 cases in just six months. And the problem is that DIY builders make it incredibly easy to accidentally violate these guidelines without ever knowing it. You're just adding a pretty image without filling in the alternative text. Or you pick a color contrast that looks nice,
[10:08]
but someone with low vision can't read it. Right. And then some businesses realize they have a problem and try to find a quick fix. Like one of those accessibility plugins or widgets. The digital bandaid. A digital bandaid. And the data shows why they fail. Of all the ADA lawsuits filed in 2025, over 22% almost a quarter were filed against websites that already had these overlays installed. Wow. So they don't actually fix the problem. They don't fix the underlying code. They just try to mask the symptoms and lawyers see you right through that. That is genuinely alarming. So what's the financial consequence when you get hit with one of these? It's not a small claims issue. The average settlement runs into several thousand dollars, sometimes north of five figures. Then you add attorney fees. And finally, the cost of actually rebuilding the site correctly. The thousands you spend fixing the mistake completely dwarfs what you would have spent on a professional compliant solution from day one. Without a doubt. That truly reframes the whole idea of a free website. It becomes a really expensive liability. So let's sum it all up. When is a free builder OK? A free builder is fine if you're just testing a concept, if it's a personal hobby blog, or a temporary placeholder. It's for projects where lost time, lost customers, and liability are irrelevant. But if you're a professional business that relies on customers finding and trusting you online, which is pretty much every business today, the hidden costs just quickly surpass any savings. You need a professional online presence. Businesses with robust websites go twice as fast. And 31% of shoppers actively avoid businesses that lack a modern, reliable site. So let's run the final numbers one last time. For a bare bones usable business site on a free builder, you're looking at $200 to $360 a year just in fees, domain privacy removing ads. Then you have to layer on at least $2,000 in opportunity cost from your lost time. And then you're exposed to thousands in potential liability from performance and accessibility issues.
[12:09]
The free site is fundamentally mispriced. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At UGRO.Pro, we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update forever for just $79 a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract, and it's strictly month to month. So there is zero risk. We're local here in AG, and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to UGRO.Pro right now, and we'll design three custom mockups for your business, completely free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening, and keep growing.