Agency Platforms
Every Platform a Small Shop Ends Up Choosing Between
Thirteen platforms with real published prices, each answering the same questions. What it costs, how it is sold, what you own, and what happens the month you stop paying.
Hosted Site Builders
Platforms that host the finished site for you. Fast to start on, and the finished website usually cannot be moved off them.
5 platformsSelf-Hosted Platforms
Platforms where the finished site is files on a server you chose. Your cost does not grow per client, and hosting becomes your job.
5 platformsAgency Operating Platforms
Platforms that run the business around the website: client reporting, lead follow up and reselling software under your own name.
3 platformsHow to read these records
Every record answers the same four questions in the same order, so you can hold two platforms side by side without translating marketing copy in your head.
- Price
- What the vendor publishes, read off their own page and dated.
- Delivery model
- How the platform is sold and where the finished site lives.
- Who it fits
- The shape of shop that tends to do well on it.
- What you own
- What is actually yours once the work is finished.
- If you stop paying
- The question almost nobody asks before signing up.
Three ways these platforms charge, and who each one suits
Comparing the headline numbers is a trap, because they are not the same kind of number. There are really only three pricing shapes in this whole market.
- Per site, every month. Webflow, Wix Studio, Squarespace, Framer and Duda all work this way. Cheap to start, and your bill grows with every client you keep. Twenty sites on a $19 plan is $380 a month, forever, and you own none of them.
- Once per site, then updates. Craft and Statamic sell a licence rather than a subscription. Statamic Pro is $349 per site with a year of updates, then $99 a year. You pay more on day one and much less in year three.
- Flat, whatever your client count. WordPress is the free version of this, where you only pay for hosting. Ours is the paid version: a setup fee plus one monthly fee that does not move when you add client twenty one.
Which shape is right depends almost entirely on how many client sites you expect to be running in three years. Under about ten, per site monthly is genuinely cheaper and simpler. Past thirty it starts to look like rent on work you already did.
About the prices
Every figure was read off the vendor's own pricing page on 9 October 2026, and each record links back to the page it came from. Nothing here is estimated.
Platform pricing moves, so treat the date as part of the information. Check the vendor link before you quote a client a number, every time.
Current feature lists are deliberately not recorded here. Those change monthly, and a stale feature list is worse than no feature list, because it reads as fact.
Want the short version?
The main site runs the same thirteen platforms through one comparison table, with the pricing shapes side by side and the client count where each one stops making sense. Read that first if you are choosing, then come back here for the detail on the two or three that survive.
Our own platform is in here
We sell one of these. AI Website Systems is filed under self-hosted platforms, carries its own price, and answers the same four questions as everything else.
It is also the most expensive thing on this page to start, and it says so in its own record along with the four places it is weakest. That is the only honest way to run a directory you appear in. If our record reads softer than the others, we have done it wrong.