alternatives
A custom alternative to Squarespace
For studios, galleries and small companies deciding between staying on Squarespace and having something made instead. The honest version, including the part where Squarespace wins.
When Squarespace is the right answer
Squarespace is a good product and for a great many sites it is the correct answer. If what you need is a handful of pages, a contact form and a shop, it will do that faster and more cheaply than any studio, and it will keep doing it without you thinking about it. Nobody should commission custom work to publish an address and an about page.
That is worth saying plainly, because most pages like this one are written by somebody who wants to sell you the alternative. If the description above matches your situation, stay where you are.
What tends to push a project past it
The site has to do something the system does not do, and the workaround has become a stack of embedded code that breaks whenever the platform updates.
The design keeps arriving at the same place, because a template resists being pushed far from what it was built for, and the work being shown deserves better than an arrangement thousands of other sites also use.
Performance matters and there is a ceiling on how much of it you control, because the page you ship is assembled by somebody else's renderer.
The site has become genuinely important to the business and the whole thing sits on infrastructure and terms that can change without you.
What a commission gives you instead
A codebase that is yours. Not a template licence, not an account you keep paying to keep the lights on. Yours, in a repository you own, that another engineer could pick up.
A design taken from your work rather than adapted onto it, and behaviour designed alongside the visuals rather than approximated with embedded snippets.
It can run anywhere. We will stand it up on your own server, or host it ourselves, and either way moving it is telling us and taking it.
The part that is not about features
Squarespace, like every hosted builder, runs your site on its own infrastructure under its own terms. That is the arrangement, and it is a reasonable one at the price. What it means is that the site is something you have access to rather than something you hold.
A commission inverts that. You get the repository, the design files and the accounts, and it can be stood up on your own server so there is no middle man in the stack at all. If you would rather not run infrastructure we will host it, and that stays a convenience you can walk away from rather than a dependency.
Whether it is worth it
Commissioned work costs more than a subscription and takes longer than an afternoon. It earns that when the site has to do something specific, when it is the first serious thing a client or an audience meets, or when the business has grown past the point where its front door should live in an account. If none of those are true yet, the honest advice is to wait until one of them is.
Other comparisons
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Questions people ask first, and guides on commissioning custom work.
use it. commission it. back it.