Staging and Unpublished Work: What Each Plan Lets You Hold

Every agency carries work that is not earning anything: a pitch build, a redesign waiting on client sign-off, a half-finished site for a client who went quiet in July. Somebody has to be paying for those, and on some platforms the answer is you, from day one.

This is the least-discussed line in agency plan comparisons and one of the easiest to get caught by. Here is what each platform publishes about unpublished work.

Webflow: staging is the explicit unit, and it is priced

Webflow is the only platform on this rack that treats unpublished work as a named, metered resource, and it is worth understanding because the free tier is tighter than people expect.

The Starter workspace is free and holds 2 staging sites with 2 pages each. That is a demo allowance, not a working allowance. Two pages is not a pitch.

Core at $19 a month billed yearly raises it to 10 staging sites with 300 pages each, and adds code export and shared libraries. Growth at $49 makes staging unlimited, alongside site-level roles, publishing permissions, password protection and 301 redirects.

So the question "how much does Webflow cost for an agency" has a component that has nothing to do with live client sites at all. A studio with four pitches in progress and no signed work is already on Core. A studio pitching constantly is on Growth for the unlimited staging alone, before a single site plan is bought.

The offsetting virtue is that a staged Webflow site costs nothing to keep. It sits in the workspace allowance indefinitely, and the allowance is a flat fee rather than a per-site charge. For a studio with a lot of dormant work, that model is considerably kinder than the alternatives.

Duda: projects are counted when published

Duda counts published projects: four included on Agency and White Label, one on Basic and Team, with additional sites at $17 a month or $168 a year on Team and above.

The word "published" is doing useful work there, and it is the right word to notice. Work that has not been published does not consume a published-project slot, so a pitch build or an unsigned redesign is not immediately a line item. What it will consume is the tier's practical headroom once it goes live, which is the moment the client starts paying anyway.

What Duda does not publish is a cap on how many unpublished projects an account may hold. That figure does not appear on the pricing page, so this sheet does not state one. If you intend to hold a large volume of dormant work, that is a question worth asking before committing, and it is the sort of thing a sales conversation answers in a sentence. The rest of the tier reading is on the Duda agency sheet.

Squarespace: extended trials are the answer, and they are good

Squarespace approaches the same problem from a completely different direction, and its solution is the most agency-shaped thing about Circle.

Rather than metering staging, Circle extends the free trial: three months on Silver, six months on Gold, twelve months on Platinum. Joining is free.

Twelve months is an enormous amount of runway for an unpaid build. It means a client redesign can be constructed, reviewed, revised and signed off without anyone paying a subscription for an invisible site. For a studio doing long, consultative projects — a rebrand that takes two quarters, a site waiting on photography that keeps slipping — that is worth more than a staging allowance, because a trial site is a full site rather than a page-limited stub.

The catch is the one Circle always carries, quoted from Squarespace's own support article: the tier discount does not apply to future renewals, reactivations or plan changes. That is about the discount rather than the trial, but it belongs in the same paragraph, because the two get described together and only one of them compounds.

The tier thresholds — what you have to do to reach Gold or Platinum — are not published on either page, so this sheet does not estimate them.

Wix Studio and Framer: not metered in a way either publishes

Wix Studio describes managing unlimited client websites from a single dashboard, with project organisation. Unlimited is unlimited, and the practical implication is that unpublished work is not a scarce resource in a Wix Studio workspace. What is not published anywhere is whether unpublished projects are treated differently from published ones for billing, so this sheet records that as unpublished rather than guessing at it.

Framer publishes page, collection, item and bandwidth limits by plan, and a ceiling of ten users with edit access on Basic and Pro. It does not publish a staging allowance as a separate concept. A Framer project exists whether or not it is on a custom domain, and the Free plan holds a project on a Framer subdomain with no custom domain.

For both, the honest answer is the same one this site gives everywhere: the figure is not published, and an unpublished figure is treated as one you cannot plan around, per the rule on how we check white label.

The pattern worth noticing

The platforms that meter staging explicitly are the ones built for people who build a lot: Webflow's staging allowance exists because Webflow expects you to have work in progress. The platforms that do not meter it are either genuinely unlimited or simply have not thought of unpublished work as a distinct category.

Neither model is better in the abstract. What matters is which one matches how your studio actually works.

If you pitch with fully-built concepts, staging allowance is a real cost and Webflow's Core or Growth workspace is a required purchase rather than an upgrade.

If you build slowly against long sign-off cycles, Squarespace's twelve-month Platinum trial is the most valuable single provision on this rack and it costs nothing.

If you build fast and publish quickly, none of this matters much, and Duda's published-project counting is the cleanest fit because you are only ever paying for live work.

What an unpublished site still costs you

Not money, necessarily, but three other things worth counting.

Attention. A dormant build is a thing you keep half-remembering. Ten of them is a background tax on a studio's working memory that nobody accounts for and everybody pays.

Drift. A site built against a platform's editor in March may not behave identically against the same editor in September. Builders ship changes continuously and do not version their editors for you. A build that sat for six months usually needs a pass before it goes live, and the pass is never as short as expected.

A decision you have not made. Most dormant builds are dormant because a client went quiet, and most studios never formally close them. The staging allowance is a useful forcing function here: when the limit is real, the question "is this project alive?" gets asked out loud, and it should be asked out loud anyway.

One practical habit

Whatever platform you land on, keep a list of dormant builds with a date on each one, and review it quarterly. Not because any platform will charge you by surprise, but because a staging allowance fills up invisibly, and the moment you discover you are at the limit is always the moment you need one more.

The wider trade-offs between these models — per-site counting, flat workspaces, and client-owned subscriptions — run through the multi-site dashboard, and the ranking they feed is on the best website builder for agencies rack.