Convenience is the perfect lure. Kit (the thing formerly known as ConvertKit), Wix, and Squarespace sell the fantasy of a polished website and a working email list in a few clicks. For a while it feels like freedom. Then the bill keeps rising, the features you actually need get locked behind higher tiers, and you realize the platform owns the house while you just pay rent.
These tools are not evil. They are simply optimized for their own growth, not yours. Here is what that looks like in practice.
The price of success keeps climbing
Kit’s pricing scales with your subscriber count. The more people who want to hear from you, the more you pay every month. Wix and Squarespace do the same with e-commerce add-ons, custom domains, and the simple act of removing their branding. Growth is punished with a higher permanent bill. If business slows for a season, you cannot easily shrink those costs without gutting the setup that made the business work in the first place. You end up paying a quiet tax on momentum.
Leaving becomes painful on purpose
Everything you build lives inside their proprietary systems. Complex site designs on Wix, carefully tuned automation sequences in Kit, historical engagement data, visual funnels—most of it does not travel with you. You can usually export a CSV of email addresses. Everything else—designs, analytics history, workflow logic—stays behind. The longer you stay, the higher the switching cost becomes. That is not an accident.
The rules can change without your consent
You are operating under someone else’s terms of service. Those terms evolve. Features disappear. Pricing jumps overnight. Entire categories of businesses get restricted or banned. When that happens you have almost no leverage. Your entire digital storefront and audience relationship exist at the pleasure of a company whose board and margins come first.
The practical way out: open-source software on cloud servers
You do not need to turn your closet into a server room. The modern version of ownership is simple: take free, open-source software and run it on a cheap virtual private server from DigitalOcean, Hetzner, Linode, or similar. You pay a flat monthly fee—often $5–15—for the machine. Your audience can grow without the software bill growing with it. You own the code, the data, and the ability to move everything to another provider whenever you want.
Solid replacements that actually exist today
For websites and blogs Self-hosted WordPress (the .org version, not WordPress.com) remains the most flexible option. Thousands of themes and plugins, full ownership of content, and the ability to migrate the entire site in an afternoon. Ghost is the cleaner, faster alternative if you mainly publish and want something that feels as polished as Squarespace while still giving you complete control of the database.
For email and automation Listmonk is lean and extremely fast. Pair it with Amazon SES (or any bulk delivery service) and the cost of sending large volumes drops to roughly a dollar per 10,000 emails instead of the escalating monthly fees Kit charges. Ghost can also handle newsletters natively, so one install can replace both your website platform and your email tool. If you need serious tag-based automation and visual workflows closer to what Kit offers at the high end, Mautic is the open-source marketing automation suite built for exactly that.
Ownership is a strategic decision, not a technical one
These proprietary platforms are excellent for testing an idea quickly. Once the business has real momentum, the convenience starts working against you. Fixed software costs, full data control, and the ability to leave without starting over are not ideological points. They are practical advantages that compound over years.
Renting is fine while you are figuring things out. Building something meant to last is different. At that point the smarter move is to stop renting the core of the business and start owning it.