Squarespace Membership Site: Costs & Alternatives

Quick answer: You can run a membership site on Squarespace — but you’ll pay 5% of membership revenue on the $23/mo Core plan, 1% on Plus, and reach 0% only on the $99/mo Advanced plan, with newsletters as a separate paid add-on. That’s fine when memberships are a side feature of a design-led site. If memberships are the business, a 0%-fee publishing platform like Ghost does the same job for $29/mo flat.

Fees verified June 2026 — confirm current figures on squarespace.com/pricing.

How Squarespace Memberships Work

Squarespace Member Sites add gated areas to a normal Squarespace website: visitors sign up (free or paid), and pages you mark as members-only sit behind that login. Payments run through Squarespace’s commerce stack, and you manage members inside the site dashboard.

For the sites Squarespace is built for — portfolios, restaurants, services, small brands — that’s a tidy way to add a premium section without new tools.

The Real Cost: The Fee Ladder

The number that matters isn’t the plan price — it’s the percentage of your membership revenue Squarespace keeps:

Two costs stack on top:

1. Email is extra. There’s no built-in newsletter — Squarespace Email Campaigns is a paid add-on (from ~$8/month), and you manually copy content into it. A membership business without email is leaving retention on the table.
2. The 0% tier costs $99/month. To stop paying a percentage, you pay more than three times the price of a dedicated membership platform.

Run the math at $1,000/month in member revenue: Core = $23 + $50 fee + ~$8 email ≈ $81/month. Advanced = $99/month + email. A flat-fee platform like Ghost Publisher = $29/month, 0%, email included.

When Squarespace Memberships Make Sense

• The website comes first — you’re a designer, studio, or restaurant whose site is the product, and memberships gate a small premium section.
• You’re already paying for Squarespace and want to test paid content without new tools.
• Your membership revenue is small enough that 5% is cheaper than changing platforms.

In those cases, stay put — switching platforms for a side feature isn’t worth it.

When You’ve Outgrown It

The signals are predictable: membership revenue grows and the 5% starts dwarfing the plan price; you want to email members every time you publish instead of rebuilding posts in Email Campaigns; you want tiers, per-post gating, and member analytics that page-gating can’t do.

That’s the point where a publishing platform with memberships at its core wins. Ghost charges 0% on every plan, connects payments to your own Stripe account, gates content per post (public / free members / paid), and sends each post to members’ inboxes natively — how to build a membership website on Ghost covers the setup, and the step-by-step membership guide gets tiers and Stripe live in an afternoon. Design-wise, membership-ready Ghost themes ship polished sign-up, pricing, and account pages, so you don’t trade away the Squarespace polish.

For the full feature-by-feature picture, see Ghost vs Squarespace; for how every membership option stacks up, the best membership platforms comparison ranks them by fees and ownership.

Bottom Line

Squarespace memberships are a feature; platforms like Ghost make memberships the business model. Keep Squarespace if the site is the point and memberships are a bonus. Move to a 0%-fee platform the moment member revenue is real — every month on the 5% ladder is a tax on growth you can stop paying.