Is Square Online Free? Square Online Pricing 2026: Free vs Plus vs Premium, Plus Every Fee

Is Square Online free? Yes. The free plan is a working online store with real checkout, no monthly fee and no time limit, and Square earns its money on each sale instead: 3.3% + 30¢ on every online card payment. Square Online pricing in 2026 has three tiers, read from Square's US plans page on 10 October 2026: Square Free costs $0, Square Plus $49 a month per location, and Square Premium $149 a month per location. On processing rates alone, Plus starts paying for itself at $12,250 of online sales a month per location.

That makes Free the right starting point for almost every new store, and the wrong place to stay for a busy one. Sellers with steady online volume, several locations or large bank-transfer invoices should read the break-even sections below before deciding; a shop selling a few hundred dollars a month can stop after the fee table.

What the free plan actually includes

The $0 tier is a complete store: unlimited products, pickup, local delivery and shipping, selling through search and social channels, and SEO tools, published on a yourname.square.site address with Square's branding on the page. Among the five products in our register of big-tech website builders, it is the only genuinely free store with a real checkout, which is why it leads that ranking.

The engine underneath is Weebly, which Square bought for $365 million in 2018 and turned into the delivery vehicle for its checkout. The longer teardown of features, the plan history and Weebly's afterlife lives in our Square Online review; this page answers a narrower question, which is what each plan really costs once sales start.

Square Online pricing 2026: Free vs Plus vs Premium, per location

Square prices all three plans per location, per month. The plans page shows a monthly figure with the words "per location" and no annual option, so a business with two shops pays two subscriptions. Below are the rates that touch an online store, as Square's US plans page printed them on 10 October 2026.

Plus adds QR-code ordering and subscriptions; Premium adds real-time shipping rates at checkout. Square also invites businesses processing more than $250,000 a year to ask about custom pricing.

The toll booth: 3.3% + 30¢ per online sale

The free plan's online rate is the line that decides most budgets. Card payments taken through the online store or an invoice cost 3.3% + 30¢ on Free, against 2.9% + 30¢ on either paid plan.

That 3.3% figure is recent. On January 13, 2026, Square lifted the online rate on its free plan from 2.9% + 30¢ to 3.3% + 30¢, and the paid plans' discounted online rate from 2.6% + 30¢ to 2.9% + 30¢; in-person rates did not move. The free tier's surcharge over the paid tiers is now 0.4 percentage points on every online sale, which is how a free store pays a payments company.

Worked examples: what a sale actually costs

The percentage gets the attention, but the flat 30¢ does the damage on small orders. Running the free plan's 3.3% + 30¢ across a few order sizes:

• $5 order: 17¢ + 30¢ = 47¢ in fees, an effective rate of 9.3%
• $10 order: 33¢ + 30¢ = 63¢, effective rate 6.3%
• $25 order: 83¢ + 30¢ = $1.13, effective rate 4.5%
• $50 order: $1.65 + 30¢ = $1.95, effective rate 3.9%
• $100 order: $3.30 + 30¢ = $3.60, effective rate 3.6%

A store of $5 items hands Square almost a tenth of its takings, while a $100 order pays close to the sticker rate. Upgrading does not change that shape, because the 30¢ is the same on every plan; only the percentage drops. A coffee roaster selling single bags feels the flat fee far more than the rate, and no subscription fixes it. Bundling items into larger orders does.

The break-even: when Plus beats Free, when Premium beats Plus

Plus saves 0.4 percentage points on online card volume, and the 30¢ cancels out because both plans charge it. To recover $49 a month from that saving you need $49 ÷ 0.004 = $12,250 in online card sales per location. At $12,250 both plans cost $404.25 in percentage fees plus subscription; below it Free is cheaper, above it Plus is. At $20,000 a month, Free's percentage fees come to $660, while Plus costs $629 once its $49 subscription is added to $580 in fees, so the gap widens slowly rather than suddenly.

Premium is a harder sell for an online store. Its online card rate is the same 2.9% + 30¢ as Plus, so the extra $100 a month has to come from elsewhere. In-person, Premium charges 0.1 points less than Plus, which means $100 ÷ 0.001 = $100,000 of in-person card volume a month before the rate alone pays. Gift cards are the other lever: Premium's 0% load fee against 2.5% on Plus covers the $100 difference once a location loads $4,000 of gift cards a month. Real-time shipping rates are the feature argument, and only you can price that.

There is a third break-even almost nobody prints. ACH payments by invoice cost 1% with no cap on Free, but are capped at $10 on Plus and Premium. A single $5,000 invoice paid by bank transfer costs $50 on Free and $10 on Plus, so two of those a month save $80, more than the $49 subscription. A business that bills trade customers by invoice can justify Plus with no online store traffic at all. If your numbers clear any of these lines, start on Square with the plan that matches them; if not, the free plan is doing its job.

Hidden line items: domain, gift cards, API payments, Afterpay

A custom domain is the first paid unlock. Free stores stay on a yourname.square.site address; connecting a domain you already own, or buying a new one through Square, needs Plus or Premium. Square's plans page does not print a domain price, and we have not confirmed whether a first-year domain is still bundled, so check the checkout screen before you assume it is free.

Two smaller items catch sellers late. Online API payments, used when a developer wires Square into a custom site, cost 2.9% + 30¢ on every plan, Free included, so a developer-built front end avoids the free plan's surcharge. Afterpay and Cash App Pay appear at checkout on the plans page, but their seller fees are not printed there, so read Square's fee schedule before switching them on.

Multi-location maths

Because every paid plan is billed per location, the break-even multiplies too. Two locations on Plus cost $98 a month and need $24,500 of combined online sales to beat Free on rates alone; three cost $147 and need $36,750. Premium for three locations is $447 a month.

This is the change that upset multi-location sellers most. Under the older Square Online plans a website subscription did not scale with the number of shops; under the unified plans it does. A chain with one busy flagship and two quiet branches may find Free cheaper overall even when the flagship alone would clear $12,250.

Legacy Square Online Plus subscribers: what changed

On October 6, 2025, Square folded 18 separate subscriptions, including the standalone Square Online plans, into the three unified plans above. Existing Square Online subscribers move over through a self-serve switch that, in Square's support documentation, "automatically cancels your Square Online hosting plan and issues a pro-rated refund." If you are still on a legacy plan, compare your old bill with $49 times your location count before you switch, because the answer differs by business.

The bottom line

Square Online is free the way a toll road is free: open to everyone, paid for per trip. For a new store with unproven demand that is a fair trade, with no fixed cost, a real checkout and an afternoon's setup. Keep three numbers by the till: 3.3% + 30¢ per online sale on Free, $12,250 of monthly online sales per location before Plus pays, and $10 as the ACH cap that can justify Plus on invoices alone.

If what you have outgrown is the design or the blog rather than the fees, a general builder such as Squarespace or Wix charges a flat subscription instead of a per-location one; our guide to when you've outgrown them lays out that move.