Good gigs exist. Fiverr’s own cost guides put a theme dressed to your business at about $50 and a design of your own from $500, often delivered in days, plenty of them by good designers. The comparison starts the day after delivery.
A one-time budget with zero appetite for a monthly bill. A buyer who enjoys managing the project: comparing sellers, writing the spec, judging the drafts and briefing the revisions. Or a build bigger than five pages: a storefront with a big catalog, a fully custom design. For those, a marketplace full of specialists is the right place to buy.
A gig ends when the files are delivered, usually onto Wix, WordPress, or Squarespace, where the hosting bill is now yours ($17 to $29 a month on Wix or Squarespace, billed annually; their published prices, checked 21 and 22 August 2026). So is the writing: most gigs need you to supply every word, and that's the step that stalls a two-day delivery for weeks. From then on you're the webmaster and the general contractor. Our $40 a month is the hosting — and the writing, done before you ever see the site.
| Fiverr gig | Plainsmith | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront | About $50 for a dressed theme, $500 and up for a design of your own (Fiverr’s own cost guides, read 12 September 2026), plus buyer fees | $0 down — $40 a month, cancel anytime |
| After delivery | Hosting and every future fix are yours | Hosting, SSL, monitoring, edits — included |
| The words | Usually yours to write | Written for you, in your trade's language |
| Changes in month three | New gig, new fee, if the seller's still around | Email support@plainsmith.co — five edit requests a month included |
| Quality odds | Varies by seller — you vet them from reviews and samples | One system, one standard — the trade demos show it, though those are our own examples rather than client work |
A $500 gig, the floor Fiverr’s own guide puts on a design of your own, plus a year of platform hosting lands between $704 and $848, before your own hours writing copy and chasing revisions, and before Fiverr’s buyer fee. That fee is 5.5% at checkout plus a small-order charge on lower-value orders; we are not putting a number on the second one, because published sources disagree on both the amount and the threshold and Fiverr has changed it more than once. You will see it at the cart. Plainsmith's whole first year runs $480 paid monthly, or $400 on the annual plan; both paths need a domain, ours at exact registry cost, about $11. A $50 theme gig plus the same hosting comes to $254 to $398, the same range as ours paid monthly; against a design of your own, ours comes in under on either plan. What differs more is after it: at the cheap end of a gig you are the writer and the project manager, and every change from month two is a new gig at a new price. Here the writing is done before you see the site, and five edit requests a month are already paid for.
Wherever it lives, paste the address into the switch page. We’ll use the services, hours and contact details we find to start your questionnaire, and you answer the rest. The old site stays up until the new one is live.
vs HubSpot · vs Squarespace · vs Wix · vs Durable · vs UENI · all of them