A Squarespace alternative for people who liked the design.
For UK creatives, restaurants, designers, photographers and boutique businesses who outgrew the template, not the look. £999 to rebuild your site as real custom code, £99 a month to look after it. Design survives. Lock-in does not.
One-off build fee. Custom Laravel + Tailwind rebuild that matches your Squarespace design and ports content, bookings and commerce.
Hosting, monitoring, security and content / copy / image edits monthly. Roughly the same as a Squarespace Business or Commerce plan.
Stripe takes the payment processing fee, not Squarespace. Members and subscribers stay yours. The codebase ships in a git repo on day one.
Brief usSquarespace is a beautiful trap.
Squarespace was always the well-designed option. The templates were tasteful, the editor was friendlier than Wix, the brand worked. For a while, that was enough. Then the bookings moved to Acuity. Then Member Areas got introduced and re-priced. Then Squarespace Commerce added a layer on top of Stripe. Then Squarespace Email Campaigns landed as another tier.
None of that is bad on its own. Stacked, it adds up to a multi-product platform where every interesting bit of your business runs inside someone else’s walls. When you outgrow Squarespace it is not because the design failed — it is because the boundary between your business and Squarespace’s product line got uncomfortable. Moving off should not mean redesigning. We rebuild the same look in real code on the same Laravel / Tailwind stack we use to run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk.
What we replace, line by line.
Every Squarespace feature has a real replacement that we wire in during the build week. You leave with the same capability, on systems you own.
That is the full inventory for most Squarespace sites. If yours uses something niche (Squarespace Acuity Plus, Memberspace, Circle) we audit it on the brief call and pick the cleanest replacement together. Nothing on the list lives on Moonlabs infrastructure forever — each row points to a system you can keep or swap independently.
The limits Squarespace charges you not to feel.
A design system, not a template
Your typography, spacing and colour tokens become a real Tailwind theme. Use them on landing pages, decks, social, anywhere. The design escapes the website it was trapped on.
Members and customers, owned
Stripe Customer Portal owns the relationship with each subscriber. They self-serve refunds, plan upgrades and invoices. No Squarespace mediator, no monthly fee per active member.
No platform cut on commerce
Stripe takes the processor fee on every order. There is no Squarespace Commerce surcharge on top, no "Premium plan only" payment method, no transaction-fee tier you forgot about until it showed up in the dashboard.
Bookings that fit the business
Acuity bundled with Squarespace is one shape; standalone Acuity is another; Cal.com is a third; a fully custom booking flow on the same Stripe rail is a fourth. We pick the one that fits, not the one Squarespace upsells you.
Faster on every Lighthouse run
A server-rendered Tailwind page typically lands at 95+ on Lighthouse Performance and Accessibility. Squarespace sites carry the editor runtime and tend to score in the 50s on mobile. The SEO follows.
A repo, not a subscription
When the engagement ends — if it ever does — you take the git repository, the database export, and the deploy instructions. You can keep running with us, or move to anyone else. No exit fee, no stranded data.
Off Squarespace, members and bookings intact.
Inventory
We walk through your Squarespace admin together. Every feature is mapped to its replacement; every member, customer, product and booking is accounted for. The replacement table goes back to you on Tuesday.
Rebuild
Custom Tailwind build that matches your existing design. Stripe, Cal.com / Acuity, MailerLite and any vendor swaps are wired in by Thursday. Staging URL is live for review.
Cut over
Friday: DNS switches to the new infrastructure, 301 redirects from every Squarespace URL preserve organic traffic, members are migrated and email-notified. £99 / month starts at cut-over.
A million ways this could look. None of them templates.
Every site we build is designed to spec, branded for one client. No shared theme between brands. No component kit we recycle. Your site won’t look like anyone else’s because nobody else got your brief.
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Designed to spec. Every page laid out fresh against your brief — not a pre-made template with your logo dropped in. -
Branded to you. Typography, palette, motion language and component shape all chosen for this brand, not a previous client’s. -
Yours forever. Code lives in a git repo that is yours from day one. No platform lock-in, no proprietary CMS, no exit fee.
The Squarespace-specific questions.
I have Member Areas / a paid newsletter on Squarespace. Can you keep that going?
Yes. Member Areas migrate to either Stripe Customer Portal + Stripe Billing (clean, owned by you, lower fee per transaction) or to MemberSpace / Memberful as a hosted equivalent if you do not want to operate it yourself. Existing members are moved across with their payment history; the URL of the gated content stays the same so existing logins keep working. We do the migration on the brief week.
I use Acuity / Squarespace Scheduling for appointments. What replaces it?
Acuity is good, and Acuity standalone (not bundled with Squarespace) is fine to keep — we just embed it in the new site instead of relying on the Squarespace wrapper. If you would rather not pay the Acuity subscription, we build a Cal.com-based booking flow in the build week with the same calendar sync and email confirmations. Either is decided on the first call.
Squarespace Commerce handles my products. How does that move?
We migrate the product catalogue, the imagery and the existing orders to Stripe-powered checkout. Stripe gives you direct payouts, lower processor fees on most plans, and no Squarespace Commerce platform cut on top. If you sell digital products or subscriptions we wire the Stripe Customer Portal so customers self-serve refunds, cancellations and invoice downloads.
Will my design survive the move? I picked Squarespace for the templates.
Better than survive — we rebuild it in Tailwind so the design is yours, codified, and editable in ways the template was not. Typography, spacing, colour tokens and section rhythms are matched against your current site on the first day. If you want a redesign instead of a rebuild, that is a separate conversation we will be honest about on the brief call.
How do my Squarespace Email Campaigns / newsletter list come across?
Squarespace Email Campaigns is fine but locked to the platform — once you leave, the campaign archive and the list stay accessible but inert. We export the subscriber list and move it to MailerLite, ConvertKit or Resend (your call), then wire the new site’s signup forms into it. Existing subscribers do not see any interruption.
How long is a Squarespace migration in practice?
A Squarespace-to-Moonlabs migration usually lands in one working week for a brochure / portfolio site, or two weeks if you have Member Areas, Commerce and bookings all running at once. We will tell you which shape yours is on the brief call.
Keep the design. Drop the platform.
Send us your Squarespace URL and we’ll come back inside 24 hours with a feature-replacement sheet and a Monday slot.
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