Squarespace vs GoDaddy domain pricing: renewal cost, privacy and the gate nobody mentions

Squarespace states in its own Help Center that common extensions like .com and .org are $20 per year, includes WHOIS privacy at no charge, and will not sell you a domain at all unless your site is on a Squarespace trial or paid plan. GoDaddy renews a .com somewhere around $19 to $22 depending on which tracker you believe, bills privacy as a separate line in most cases, and has no site requirement. On recurring cost they land in roughly the same place. The decision is really about the gate on one side and the upsell screens on the other.

Most comparisons of these two treat them as the same kind of product. They are not. GoDaddy is a registrar that also sells websites. Squarespace is a website company that also runs a registrar, and it inherited about ten million domains from Google in September 2023 without most of those customers ever choosing it. That difference in origin explains almost every practical thing that follows.

Squarespace vs GoDaddy at a glance

Squarespace figures below are quoted from two of its own properties and dated. GoDaddy blocks automated price checks, so its figures are ranges drawn from third party trackers that disagree with one another by several dollars. Confirm any number on the checkout page before you commit.

What you are comparing	Squarespace Domains	GoDaddy	The floor underneath both
.com per year	$20, stated in the Squarespace domains FAQ	Roughly $19 to $22 at renewal, promotional in year one	$10.26 registry wholesale plus the $0.20 ICANN fee
.org per year	$20, same FAQ	Broadly comparable to its .com renewal	$11.00 wholesale since June 1, 2026
Specialty extensions	$30 for .photography, $50 for .media	Wide spread, frequently higher at renewal	Varies by registry
WHOIS privacy	Included free on every domain	Sold as a paid add on in most cases	Registry redaction is separate from what a registrar publishes
Can you buy without a website plan	No. Requires a Squarespace trial or paid plan	Yes, registrar accounts are standalone	Not a registry rule, a company decision
Names that are already taken	Nothing. No marketplace, no auctions, no backorders	The largest aftermarket in the industry, via Afternic and GoDaddy Auctions	The aftermarket sits above the registry entirely
Checkout	Clean, price shown includes tax	Several screens of add on prompts	Not applicable
Refund window	Five days from registration	Varies by product and term	Registry fees are not refundable to the registrar
Best for	A site already built on Squarespace	Chasing a name somebody else owns, or wanting one vendor for everything

How much does a Squarespace domain cost compared to GoDaddy?

Close to the same, once you look past year one. The Squarespace domains FAQ puts common TLDs like .com and .org at $20 per year and specialty strings such as .photography and .media at $30 and $50. A separate post on the Squarespace Domains blog gives ranges rather than fixed figures, listing .com at $10 to $20 per year, .io at $35 to $60 and .co at $25 to $35. Third party trackers put GoDaddy's .com renewal at roughly $19 to $22, which puts the two companies within a couple of dollars of each other on the extension most people actually buy.

Where they diverge is the first year. GoDaddy runs aggressive promotional pricing, sometimes close to a dollar on a multi year term, and recovers it on every renewal afterwards. Squarespace mostly does not play that game, and it hands out one free custom domain in the first year of an annual site plan instead, which is a better deal than any promotional registrar price if you were buying the website anyway.

Both sit well above the floor. Verisign charges every registrar on earth the same $10.26 for a year of .com, and ICANN adds twenty cents on top, so about $10.46 is the honest bottom of any .com. That floor rises to $10.97 on November 1, 2026 under the pricing terms of the registry agreement renewed in November 2024, and retail follows wholesale upward within a few months. If ongoing cost is the thing you care most about, comparing registrars on renewal price matters far more than comparing these two on a banner figure.

Why you cannot buy a Squarespace domain without a website plan

This is the single largest practical difference and it is oddly under reported. The Squarespace FAQ answers the question directly: if your site is on a trial or a paid plan, you can purchase domains through Squarespace. There is no standalone registrar account. The domain business is bolted to the website business, which makes sense from where Squarespace sits and is a hard stop from where a buyer sits.

The knock on effects are real. Your first domain is not $20, it is $20 plus a site plan unless you stay inside the trial. An agency holding names for clients cannot park them in a plain registrar account. An investor cannot use Squarespace at all in any sensible way. And anyone who just wants to register a domain and point the DNS at a host somewhere else has to buy a product they do not intend to use.

GoDaddy has no such requirement, and neither does any registrar whose primary business is domains. That is not GoDaddy being generous, it is simply what a registrar normally is.

Does Squarespace or GoDaddy include WHOIS privacy?

Squarespace includes it, GoDaddy usually charges for it. Squarespace states that domain privacy is included for free with all domains registered through Squarespace, and it was doing that before redaction became the industry norm. GoDaddy sells privacy as an add on in most cases, which is worth five to fifteen dollars a year on top of the renewal and quietly closes the gap between the two companies' real annual cost.

Worth understanding what privacy does and does not cover. Since the ICANN Registration Data Policy came into force on August 21, 2025, most personal fields are redacted in the public record by default anyway, though the registrant organization, state and country stay visible. The registrar field is always public, on every domain, with no exceptions, which is why you can still find out who owns a domain to the extent of knowing where it is registered even when everything else reads REDACTED.

Which one is better when the name you want is already taken?

GoDaddy, decisively, and it is the clearest win either company has in this comparison. GoDaddy operates Afternic and GoDaddy Auctions, which between them hold the deepest listed inventory in the business. Squarespace has nothing here at all: no marketplace, no auctions, no backorders, no valuation tooling. Its search box tells you the name is taken and the conversation ends.

One caveat on the GoDaddy side, because it catches people out. GoDaddy retired its backorder product. New credit purchases stopped on August 8, 2024, and placing a backorder ended entirely on October 7, 2025. So if the plan was to queue for a name that is about to drop, GoDaddy will not do that for you any more either, and you need a drop catching service or a platform running expiry auctions directly, so the expiry timeline is worth understanding before you pay for either.

This is the part of the process where a registrar search box is the wrong tool in general. Most short, memorable strings were registered years ago, and the useful question is not whether a name is free but what it would take to get it. Before you settle for a worse name with a hyphen in it, it is worth checking what people actually search for around the phrase you have in mind, because the version with real demand behind it is often not the one you started with. Then look at how to buy a domain name that somebody already owns, which is an ordinary transaction rather than an exotic one.

How to transfer a domain from Squarespace to GoDaddy or anywhere else

The mechanics are documented and not obstructive. In the Squarespace domains dashboard, open the domain, switch the Domain Lock toggle off, then click Request transfer code and reauthenticate with your password or your two factor method. Squarespace emails the authorization code to the registrant contact and says it should arrive within 24 hours. You hand that code to the gaining registrar, and Squarespace states the transfer itself can take up to 15 days.

The locks are what actually delay people. Squarespace applies a 60 day lock when a name is first registered, another 60 day lock when a name is transferred in, and a further lock after a change to registration data. None of the three can be waived, by Squarespace or anybody else, because they come from ICANN policy rather than registrar preference. There is one exception documented on the Squarespace side: on Tucows backed accounts, changing the contact email triggers a 10 day lock instead of 60.

Two facts that help with timing. Squarespace says a domain that expired within the past 30 days can still be transferred away provided it has no active lock. And a standard gTLD transfer adds a year to whatever registration time is left rather than resetting it, so you do not lose the remainder. Our comparison of registrars on renewals, privacy and transfers is where to settle the destination before you request the auth code.

What ex Google Domains customers should check

If your name came across in the migration, you never chose Squarespace, and there is a specific number worth looking at. Google Domains sold a .com at a flat $12. Squarespace honored the old pricing for twelve months and that protection expired on September 7, 2024. Everything since has renewed at the Squarespace rate, on auto renew, which is on by default. Two full renewal cycles have now passed for most of those names.

A second thing that did not survive the move: dynamic DNS is not supported in Squarespace Domains. Google Domains offered it, and anyone who was using DDNS for a home server or a self hosted service needs a third party DNS provider now.

Also worth knowing which registrar you are actually under. Squarespace sells through three of its own entities, Squarespace Domains LLC, Squarespace Domains II LLC and Squarespace Domains Canada Inc., and resells through the Tucows family, including Tucows and EPAG, and the Key-Systems family, including Key-Systems GmbH and Instra. Squarespace Domains II LLC holds IANA accreditation number 895, which ICANN originally issued to Google and which moved across with the sale. A lookup that returns Tucows on a Squarespace name is normal and does not mean anything is wrong.

So which should you use?

Stay with Squarespace if your website is on Squarespace. One dashboard for the site, the DNS and the name genuinely removes a category of problems, privacy costs nothing, and the free first year domain on an annual plan beats every promotional registrar price available to you. For one business with one site and one name, that is a sensible place to sit and there is no reason to move for the sake of a few dollars.

Use GoDaddy if the name you want is already registered, or if you want one vendor for hosting, email and domains and are willing to click past the upsell screens to get it. Its aftermarket reach is the real product and nothing in this comparison touches it.

The same comparison is worth running against the other platforms that bundle a domain with a subscription. Wix domains pricing publishes a first year figure but no renewal rate card for .com, .net or .org, while Shopify domain name cost is the rare case where the company states outright that the renewal matches what you paid upfront.

Use neither if you hold more than a handful of names or if you want to register without buying a website subscription. The registrar comparison covers where to go instead, and the same reasoning applies against GoDaddy. If you are still deciding on the string itself rather than the vendor, start from getting a domain name and work forward, and check the ten year cost rather than the first year on whatever you land on.

Whichever way you go, do one boring thing first: log in, find the renewal date and the renewal price, and write both down. Nearly every complaint about domain pricing at any registrar traces back to nobody having looked at that screen since the day they bought the name.