A note on bias: I am the Senior Brand Manager at Format, so take everything below with the disclosure that I am biased. I am not a neutral party in this conversation. But beyond my employment status, I’m also a professional artist who actively works and exhibits in the industry. Outside of my own practice, I’ve worked in: galleries representing photographers and artists, curated shows both inside institutions and independently, written about art professionally, taught university art courses, and maintained my own studio practice the whole time. My husband is a designer, art director, and illustrator. I’ve spent my career, my life, inside the creative industry, not just adjacent to it, and that’s the lens this is written through, not just a marketing one.
It is also from this position that I’ve chosen to align myself with Format. After eight years with the company, I’m still proud to call myself one of its members. My colleagues all have similar backgrounds to mine: photographers, designers, artists, and writers. We build Format not just for our members, but for ourselves. I’m biased, but this bias, and the bias of my colleagues, is what makes Format stand apart from the corporate monoliths in our industry.
What just happened
Squarespace raised its prices this month. Fstoppers writer Adam Matthews broke down the numbers in a recent piece: the Core plan jumped 26%, from $23 to $29 a month on annual billing, and the Basic plan rose 19%, from $16 to $19*. For a lot of working photographers, this is not just a rounding error. With the industry hurting from the rise of generative AI, every dollar counts.
Matthews opens his piece with something that’s stuck with me: “For most of us, a portfolio website is a clean, deliberate space where we curate our perspective and control the sequence of our imagery without the platform getting in the way. Yet it also has to work hard behind the scenes. It houses the blog where we track our evolving creative ideas, and it serves as the primary lead-generation engine that connects our work with actual clients.” The phrase “without the platform getting in the way” is the one that stayed with me. And it’s exactly what’s at stake when a platform starts prioritizing its own roadmap over that quiet, reliable utility.
*Based on Squarespaces’s published pricing announcement and publicly available pricing information.
What the Squarespace price hike is reportedly funding
Here’s the part that stings most, according to the article: the increases are tied to Squarespace’s new “Design Intelligence” push, a set of generative AI layout and automated copywriting tools. For photographers, the way you show and talk about your own work (your artist statement, your captions, the way you sequence and present a body of work) is an authentic statement about who you are and what you’re trying to say. Most creatives want control over these parts of their presentation, so raising prices for a tool that works counter to that need hits harder.
AI is part of every tech company’s workflow at this point, including ours. I won’t pretend otherwise (I used Claude to clean up this article for you). But there’s a real difference between using AI to make unser internal work faster and pushing AI onto the creative surface our members use to present ihre work. Format is exploring how AI could be used to expedite steps like onboarding, or help with things like SEO (i.e. to help with skills outside of the expertise of our members). But, we’re being deliberately cautious and thoughtful. We want to keep the process of portfolio building and client presentation centred around the visual acumen and individuality of our members. As such, our development over the past two years has centred around making the human part of portfolio-building easier: the sequencing, the curation, the point of view, and not automating it away. If your business is presenting your own creative judgment to the world, the last thing you want is a tool nudging you toward a generic, machine-generated version of that judgment.
Price increases happen. How you handle them is the tell.
I’m not going to pretend price increases are avoidable. The cost of running a platform goes up. Format has raised prices for existing members twice in the last three years, each time by approximately $1-2/month*. These increases also followed a long stretch where we held our prices steady in an effort to minimize hardship for our members who were feeling the effects of the Covid pandemic.
Our initial post-Covid price increase was met with a lot of feedback (aka backlash). Members couldn’t see the explicit value they were getting with that increase. As an organization, we took this to heart and invested those dollars into a massive overhaul of the product, delivering not only the tools most requested by members, but also in where we see the industry going with tools like enhanced hosted video delivery.
We’re a real business, not a nonprofit. But there’s a difference between raising prices incrementally with the cost-of-business, and raising prices by up to 26% in one fell swoop. In his article, Matthews points out that Squarespace’s approach leans hard on subscriber inertia: betting that migrating years of galleries and blog posts is too painful for most people to bother with.
Ultimately, it comes down to looking at a cost comparison between Format and Squarespace. Format’s prices remain up to 47% lower than those of Squarespace**, with the biggest savings being on our Basic level. For Format, we try to preserve the cost of entry of emerging creatives, for whom the cost of doing business is felt the most.
*Increase amounts depended on plan size and addons. There are also a few outlier exceptions where this amount varied for members who were grandfathered from older plans via outside payment processors
**Based on Squarespaces’s published pricing announcement and publicly available pricing information. Squarespace pricing as published at [squarespace.com/pricing], July 29. 2026, US list price, same billing cycle. See Format pricing in full.
Why Format, specifically
Beyond pricing, the bigger issue with platforms like Squarespace is that they’re built to be everything for everyone: small businesses, plumbers, restaurants, bands, photographers, all squeezed into the same set of templates and blocks. When a company serves such a wide audience, you’re paying for things you don’t need.
Format deliberately has stayed a smaller, more focused company, and our team is made up of photographers, artists, and designers who actually use the tools we build. A few things I’d point to specifically:
- Portfolio tools built around imagery first: including Flex Block, our newer drag-and-drop layout editor, plus a steady stream of media and template improvements over the past year specifically.
- Client galleries built for photographer workflows: private, secure proofing and delivery, print-ready file sharing, and activity tracking, designed around how photographers actually work with clients, not retrofitted from a generic file-sharing feature.
- The Format Store: where you sell your own work on your own terms, with zero commission from us, and you choose your own payment processor.
- Coming up- a new mood board tool: to help members collaborate on the behind-the-scenes work (if you’d like to be part of it, our upcoming beta sign-up is open).
I use Format myself, for my day job but also for my own fine art practice. I use our client galleries to share work with collectors, curators, and galleries, and I hear regularly how professional my portfolio and the way I share my work looks. That’s not a talking point. It’s just been true in my own experience using the product I help market.
A word on the other alternatives
Matthews’s article lauds Format as an alternative that “retain[s] the clean, visual-first backend that Squarespace used to champion.” The piece also mentions Adobe Portfolio, Pixpa, and Showit as options for photographers thinking about leaving Squarespace. All worth a look, but I’d gently push back on Adobe Portfolio specifically. In my experience, it carries a lot of the same issues as Squarespace: a large, catch-all company building a one-size-fits-most product, with subscription costs that keep climbing. When products become synonymous with being an industry standard the way Adobe has, they rely on us not being able to migrate off their service. (For an outside perspective on this, read Kyle Christensen’s article on Red Branch Media here.) Added to this, their portfolio offering, again in my experience, requires quite advanced knowledge of Adobe programs to get the results you want.
The bigger point
I care about these issues beyond my job title. I believe a world with art at its centre is a better world, and that we need to preserve our human lead, creative industries at all costs. As a consumer of products for creatives myself, I’m growing tired of the large, mass-market offerings that can outspend, buy out, and try to force our purchasing decisions. As an artist who champions small businesses, I consider my role at Format to be part of a bigger picture: to offer a bespoke, boutique alternative to the Squarespaces of the world. To bring the same energy to the SaaS industry as I do to my practice, and to champion something unique, something art-centric, something that celebrates the enduring power of human creativity. That’s something that’s hard to put a price on.
