The short answer
If you need a few pages, a contact form, and a way to book simple appointments, Wix will do it, and you can edit it yourself. Go custom when the site has to do work specific to your business: book around real capacity, show customers where their job stands, run memberships, or talk to the software you already use. And know going in that a Wix site stays on Wix.
What Wix costs
Wix's plans, per month and billed yearly, in US dollars as Wix listed them in October 2026. A service business that takes bookings or payments needs Core or higher.
| Plan | Per month | Bookings and payments | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | $17 | No | 2 GB |
| Core | $29 | Yes | 50 GB |
| Business | $39 | Yes | 100 GB |
| Business Elite | $159 | Yes | Unlimited |
- The domain is free for the first year only.
- Business email through Google Workspace, bought through Wix, runs $7 to $22 per person per month.
- Apps from the Wix App Market are priced separately, and some cost more than the plan itself.
- Paying month to month costs more than the yearly prices above.
What Wix Bookings can and cannot do
- It handles appointments, classes, and courses, with an intake form, email or text reminders, and calendar sync.
- Each staff member can have their own working hours.
- Deposits can be taken online with the rest paid in person, but not together with manual approval, and Wix says deposits are not yet available to every account.
- You can add Bookings for free, but you need a paid plan before it takes a booking.
Where Wix runs out for a service business
- You cannot export the site's code or move it to another host. Wix says the site has to run on its servers, though your content and your domain are yours to take.
- Even custom code, through Wix's developer mode, runs on Wix.
- Booking follows Wix's rules. Offering only times your bays, staff, and equipment can cover, like the booking we built for a repair shop, is outside what it does.
- Customer portals with job status, messages tied to each job, or memberships with a member card are builds, not settings.
What a custom site costs
Our websites start at $3,000, and sites with a customer portal start at $8,000, with a fixed price agreed before any work starts. A custom site is code, so it can be moved to another host or handed to another developer; ask whoever builds it, us included, to put in writing that you get the code.
Which one to pick
- Pick Wix if the site is a brochure, you want to edit it yourself tonight, and its booking fits how you book.
- Pick custom if customers need to do something on your site that Wix only does halfway, or if your site needs to connect to the software that runs your business.
- Either way, start with what your customers call about most and make sure the site answers it.