What you're really buying

Squarespace is famous for elegant templates, and they are elegant. But a template is like a rented room. Your content lives inside someone else's layout. The moment you want something the template doesn't have, you hit a wall. A bigger headline. A different page layout. A section that doesn't exist. In Squarespace you choose from the options. You rarely get exactly what you pictured.

What it costs

• · Squarespace Basic: $16 a month billed yearly ($192 a year).

• · Squarespace Core: $23 a month ($276 a year). The plan most real websites need.

• · Squarespace Plus: $39 a month ($468 a year). Advanced: $99 a month ($1,188 a year).

• · Paying monthly costs $25 to $139 a month.

• · Mevin: free plan to start. Simple is $84 your first year, then $99. The design is made for you, not picked from a catalog.

Why people pick Mevin

Mevin doesn't show you a hundred templates. It designs your website around your idea, with colors and style built for your brand. You look at a real website and refine it, instead of browsing and settling. "The template doesn't allow that" is a sentence you'll never hear. Everything can be changed, by chat or by hand, free.

Under the design there's more. Every post and project gets its own fast page that Google can find. Forms send answers straight to you. And you can talk to the founder when you want something, which beats a help center on its best day.

Which one should you pick?

If you're running a serious online store today, Squarespace's commerce plans are a fair fit. For everything else, the website, the blog and the brand, Mevin gets you a bolder result for around a third of the yearly price. And the design starts from your idea, not from template row three.