$19/month is $684: a three-year cost calculator for a one-page shop site

Every local-shop website decision is made at the wrong moment. It is made when a builder offers a free trial, when a link-in-bio app offers a "Pro" tier for less than a lunch, when the shop owner is on a phone at 11pm and the number on the screen is $19. Nobody signs a three-year contract; they tap a monthly price and forget it.

So the useful number is not the monthly one. It is the one nobody computes at that moment: $19 × 36 = $684, before tax, before the domain renews in year two, for a page that was finished in the first week.

I built a small calculator that does exactly that arithmetic and nothing else: the three-year cost calculator. You pick a vendor preset or type your own monthly figure, pick annual or monthly billing, pick one to two or three years, and it prints the total next to a $0 page and a one-off kit. Every preset carries the date its price was read from the vendor's own pricing page, because a cost comparison without a date is a rumour.

The numbers, read from the vendors' own pages

This is the table the calculator is built from. All figures read on 14 November 2026 (Linktree's on 13 November), all of them list prices, none of them from a review site:

Three details in that table are the whole reason a general "website costs $X per year" claim is useless:

1. Annual billing is not a discount on the monthly price, it is a different price. Squarespace Basic is $19 billed annually and $25 month to month. Over three years the difference between those two clicks is $216. Linktree Pro's is $108. Wix only prints the yearly rate — so the calculator refuses to invent a monthly one and says so in the toggle instead.
2. The free domain is year one only. Squarespace's annual plan includes one year of free domain registration; years two and three renew at the registrar's rate, which is a line the vendor's pricing page does not include in its monthly figure.
3. None of these totals include tax or card processing. They are list prices. The real bill is higher, not lower.

The "annual" column is still twelve payments a year — a card charged $228 once. Nothing compounds, nothing is discounted further, and I deliberately did not adjust for inflation: the direction of every omission is upward.

What the calculator actually does

Open it and there are five controls: a vendor preset, a billing toggle, a monthly figure, a year count, and a table count.

• Typing a different monthly figure silently switches the selection to "Your own plan". This is the one rule I would defend hardest. If you type $42 while "Squarespace Basic $19" is highlighted and the verdict still credits Squarespace, the tool is lying on your behalf. Changing the number changes the claim.
• The table count sizes the printed half of the kit, because the printed pieces are per table: ten tables or fewer is the $49 Starter package, thirty is $89, a hundred is $149, and above that the page says so instead of guessing a price.
• It is one static page with no backend. Every number is computed in the browser. Nothing is submitted, there is no email field, no account, and after the page has loaded it works with the network off. There is no way for a calculator about money to be worth a tracking pixel.
• Two layout decisions were made for a phone at 11pm: the number inputs are 19px so iOS does not zoom the page when they are focused, and under 640px the "read on" date column collapses into a single line underneath the table rather than scrolling sideways.

The two vendors I could not put in the table

Restaurants and food trucks rarely pay Squarespace. They pay a POS company, and here the pricing pages fall into two different kinds of silence.

Toast publishes no software price at all. Its pricing page answers "What are the upfront costs?" with hardware and implementation, says those "vary depending on your specific hardware packages", and routes everything else to a quote — with a "pay-as-you-go" option described as an all-in-one platform rate that reduces the upfront hardware and installation cost. There is no monthly software number to put in a comparison, and inventing one (the "$0 software" or "$99/month" figures that float around reseller blogs) would be exactly the thing a calculator cannot do.

Clover publishes prices, but not as a software line. That distinction cost me a correction, so it is worth spelling out. My first version of the page said neither vendor publishes a price. That was wrong, and it took one click to find out: clover.com/pricing has a tile per business type, and "Full service dining" opens a bundle table read on 14 November 2026:

Card-present processing is 2.3% + 10¢, typed-in is 3.5% + 10¢, and "prices shown are only available on Clover.com" — other business types get different tables. The two columns are defined in the page's own dialog: a subscription is "a monthly rate for your plan, devices, and accessories"; a purchase is "devices and accessories upfront, then … just the monthly plan fee". So $89.95/mo is a real published plan fee. What Clover does not publish is a price for software alone — the hardware rides inside every number, and the price changes with your business type.

Which means the honest statement is narrower than the one I first wrote: neither Toast's quote nor Clover's bundle gives you a per-month figure for "a page you own", so the calculator's POS preset asks you to type the figure from your own quote or invoice. The page and its structured-data FAQ both carry the corrected text now. If you are writing comparison content about vendors whose pricing is "contact sales", that is the trap: contact sales and no published price are different claims, and the second one is the kind that gets caught in public.

Where the arithmetic stops

A calculator that only argues one way is an ad. This one stops in four places, and they are printed on the page:

• It counts one page. If you sell products, run a blog, need a page per stylist, take bookings with deposits or want a store, a builder is the right tool and its monthly fee is the price of that. The page says so next to its own verdict.
• It excludes tax, domain renewals after year one, and third-party apps.
• $19/month does buy something. An editor, a template library, hosting, SEO settings, forms, a support desk. For a shop that uses four of those, it is the cheapest hour of labour it will ever buy.
• The $0 page is not a website platform. It is one page: prices, hours with an open-now state on the shop's own clock, the address with a Directions button, photos, reviews and a tap-to-call number, at /s/your-shop. The paid tiers add a photo gallery, a notice line and dropping the credit line; a $13.99 tier adds the shop's own domain and one build of the page by us.

The gap the calculator prints is therefore not "subscriptions are a scam". It is: if the job is three facts and a phone number, you are renting a workshop to hang a sign.

If you want the printed half done for you

The calculator's last control sizes the paper: QR poster, printed price sheet, table cards, table tent, stickers, Wi-Fi cards, review cards, a Google Business Profile kit and the live page itself — fifteen pieces, one payment, delivered within 24 hours, no subscription and nothing auto-renewing.

Order the $49 Starter kit (ten tables or fewer; $89 for thirty, $149 for a hundred). Card details go to Polar as merchant of record, not to the site, and the order form asks for the shop's Maps link, hours, phone number and price list — a photo of the paper menu is enough.

And if you just want to see the arithmetic with your own numbers before deciding anything: the calculator is here. One screen, no email field, and every preset labelled with the date it was read.

Sources

• squarespace.com/pricing — Basic $25/mo monthly, $19/mo annual; annual plans include one year of free domain; no free plan, 14-day trial; Core $39/mo. Read 14 Nov 2026.
• wix.com/plans — Light $17, Core $29; "displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions, paid in full at the time of purchase"; prices exclude tax; Wix prints no monthly rate. Read 14 Nov 2026.
• linktr.ee/s/pricing — Starter $7/mo billed annually ($9 monthly), Pro $14/mo ($17 monthly), Premium $30/mo ($35 monthly). Read 13 Nov 2026.
• toasttab.com/pricing — upfront costs are hardware and implementation; software/subscription pricing by quote. Read 14 Nov 2026.
• clover.com/pricing → Full service dining — Starter $179/mo × 36 or $1,799 + $89.95/mo; Standard $239 or $2,548 + $109.90; Advanced $354 or $4,447 + $129.85; card 2.3% + 10¢, keyed 3.5% + 10¢. Read 14 Nov 2026.