Weebly Customers Are Not Happy with Crazy Price Increases
Just do a quick search and you’ll find plenty of threads of Weebly customers complaining about pretty insane price increases. Users reported their annual renewals jumping from $252 to $816 or even from $300 to $864 per year. Some users now reporting that their website pricing is now getting raised to over $1600 for 2 years. That’s crazy for a hosted platform.
So, what happened?
Square Bought Weebly, Ruined It, and Jacked Up the Price
You may or may not know this, but Square (the CC processing company) purchased Weebly back in 2018, forcing all of Weebly’s customers into the Square Ecosystem, formerly known as “Square Online” which never really caught on. Since then they’ve jacked up the price and forced Weebly customers to use their own proprietary web builder tools, something many customers have said they do not like at all.
Bait and Switch Pricing with Domains and Features
While some plans offer a “free domain” for the first year, renewals typically cost around $19.95 to $20.00 per year thereafter. Meanwhile, you can unlock your domain from Weebly and transfer it to Cloudflare where you can pay for your domain with no markup (~$12/yr). We can help you with this process if you find it confusing (they don’t make it obvious).
Basic multimedia features like video backgrounds or memberships, which were once more accessible, are now gated behind the Professional or Performance tiers. WordPress sites can have all of these features already at little or no extra costs.
Adding Transaction Fees On Top of CC Processing Fees
If the price changes and bait and switch tactics aren’t already bad enough, Weebly now charges a 3% platform transaction fee on all sales for the Free, Personal, and Professional plans. This is on top of standard payment processor fees (typically 2.9% + $0.30). That’s a total of almost 6% of your top line! Just finding more and more ways to nickel and dime their customers!
Proprietary Platforms vs Open Source Systems
The main difference between Weebly (or other similar services) vs something like WordPress that is Open Source, is the core system.
Proprietary platforms use only their own private system that you can only use with their hosting and pricing, they have you locked in and you can’t move to another host if prices get changed.
However, with Open Source, the core system itself is free to use or modify or move to any host any time you want, which gives the user the freedom to shop around for better pricing, or move to another hosting provider whenever needed. That freedom keeps providers more competitive, most honest, and gives the customer the flexibility to take their site elsewhere if need be, because they actually own their website, their content, and the rights to use the open source system anywhere they want. This is a massive difference.
Not all Open Source systems are equal, though. WordPress is the largest, powering more than 40% of all websites, with literally millions of developers who have contributed to it over the years. The community around WordPress is so large, it’s easy to find low cost solutions or plugins for almost anything a business would ever need.
Migrate Your Site to WordPress and Save Money Before Your Next Renewal!
If you have a normal, small-ish website without any crazy features (Weebly doesn’t really offer any crazy features, so you most likely do not), then migrating your site to a new system is not a big project. Some sites can even be moved to a fresh WordPress site in less than 24 hrs.
So, if your overpriced Weebly renewal is coming up, do yourself a favor: let the expert Rocket Ivy team move your content to a new, cheaper, and better open source WordPress website that you can own and never have to “start over” ever again. And, enjoy our no-hassle way of managing your site’s updates, maintenance, and support so that you don’t have to do it yourself, all for a cheaper price than Weebly.