An Agency Plan, or a Plan Per Client?

Before any platform is picked, there is a structural question that decides most of the rest of them: does the subscription belong to you or to the client?

Almost every agency answers it by accident, usually by doing whatever was convenient on the first project and then never revisiting it. It is worth answering deliberately, because it determines who can cancel, who gets the renewal notice, what a handover involves, and how much unrecoverable money is sitting in your account if a client stops paying you.

There are three real structures. This sheet sets out what each costs you, and which platforms make each one easy.

Structure one: everything in your account

You hold every client site on your own subscription. The client has an editor login at most. They pay you; you pay the platform.

What it buys. Total operational control. Multi-site dashboards work properly, because every site really is in one place. Your team's seats cover everything. You can move a client between plan tiers, fix something at midnight, and never wait for a password. Tier-level pricing works in your favour once you pass the included site count, because per-site rates are almost always lower than a client buying their own plan at retail.

What it costs. You are the credit risk. Every site you host for a client who has stopped paying you is a site you are paying for out of your own money while you decide how awkward you are prepared to be. You are also the single point of failure: if your account lapses, every client site goes with it, which is a conversation nobody has ever enjoyed having.

And the exit is the worst of the three. A client leaving has to be migrated out of your account, and on platforms with no transfer mechanic that means either a rebuild or a negotiation you are conducting from a weak position.

Who makes it easy. Duda, plainly — four included projects on Agency and White Label and published extra-site rates of $17 a month or $168 a year on Team and above. Wix Studio too: unlimited client sites in one workspace is precisely this structure, and it is the thing Wix Studio is best at.

Structure two: the client's own account, you as a contributor

The client buys the subscription in their name. You are added with editing or administrative access.

What it buys. You are not the credit risk and you are not the single point of failure. The client owns what they paid for, which is the answer most clients would give if anyone asked them. Handover is nearly free — you remove yourself and leave. Renewal notices go to the person who is actually renewing.

What it costs. Operational friction, constantly. Every site is a separate login, a separate billing relationship and a separate set of permissions to remember. Multi-site dashboards do not help because the sites are not yours. Small changes require access you may or may not still have. And you have no leverage at all, which is fine while the relationship is good.

Who makes it easy. Squarespace, more than anything else on the rack. The Circle route is built for exactly this: you add the client as a contributor, and Squarespace states plainly that your client can become the website owner and keep, limit, or remove your access if they choose. Circle's extended trials — three months on Silver, six on Gold, twelve on Platinum — exist so the client is not paying during the build, which is the main objection to this structure.

Structure three: your management, their card

The site stays under your operational control, but the client's payment method is on the subscription. This is the structure most agencies actually want and few realise is available.

What it buys. The credit risk goes away without the operational friction coming back. You still manage the site, still hold the seats, still see everything in one dashboard. The client pays the platform directly for the platform, and pays you for your work — two clean invoices with two clean explanations.

What it costs. It is the least widely supported of the three, it is usually gated to a specific tier, and the mechanics differ enough between platforms that you cannot assume it works the way you remember from somewhere else.

Who makes it easy. Two platforms, differently.

Duda does it with Client Billing, available on the Team plan and above — so from $29 a month billed annually. It runs through Stripe, Duda charges no additional fee for it, and the client-facing side is branded as yours, from the emails to the checkout to the invoice. That last part is unusual: the branding applies on tiers that do not include platform rebranding at all.

Webflow does it with client payments, on Freelancer and Agency workspaces. The client is invited to pay for their own site plan and add-ons while the site stays in your workspace. Two things to know, and both come from Webflow's own help centre rather than a first-hand read, because those pages block automated access. First, client payments do not transfer ownership — the site remains yours until it is explicitly transferred. Second, transferring a site that carries a paid site plan requires that same Freelancer or Agency workspace, and the client's workspace cannot be Enterprise.

Wix Studio describes billing management from the agency dashboard, but does not publish a billing-transfer mechanic on its agency page. That is an absence rather than a denial, but it is not something to plan a business around without asking.

The question that actually decides it

Not "which is best" — none of them is. The deciding question is: what happens on the worst day?

If the worst day you can imagine is a client who stops paying you while their site stays live, structure one is expensive and structure three fixes it.

If the worst day is a client who leaves acrimoniously and wants their site out, structure two is nearly frictionless and structure one is a hostage negotiation.

If the worst day is your own account lapsing, structure one is catastrophic and the other two are a bad afternoon.

Most studios eventually land on structure three for retained clients and structure two for one-off builds, and pick a platform that supports whichever of those is the larger half of their book. Which platform that is, and what each one charges to permit it, is the whole of the best website builder for agencies rack.

What this sheet will not tell you

It will not tell you what to charge for any of this, or what margin to take on a resold subscription, or what agencies typically bill for hosting and maintenance. Those numbers get quoted constantly in this category and they are not sourced from anywhere — they vary by a factor of ten between markets and between studios of different sizes, and repeating one would be inventing a figure and dressing it as research.

What is publishable is what each structure permits and what each platform charges to permit it. That is what is here. The pricing conversation with your own clients is one nobody outside your business is qualified to have.