What a small business marketing stack really costs in 2026 - and what one flat price changes

Nobody sets out to pay for five marketing tools. It happens one at a time.

First the website. Then a newsletter, because everyone says the money is in the list. Then a form that talks to the newsletter, and something to keep track of who bought what. Then a scheduler for the posts, because nobody can remember to put things on Instagram at ten on a Tuesday. Then, one quiet January, a plan, because the posts had stopped saying anything.

Each one was a sensible small decision. Each one has its own login, its own bill and its own way of counting you, mostly by the size of your list or the number of people using it. The person who started out wanting to make pots ends up running five tools to do one job, and paying for all of them every year.

Here is what that costs, line by line, for two small businesses you might recognise.

Running a small business should be simpler. It should not mean spending your time and money on a growing collection of website tools, subscriptions and services, or having to understand SEO, keep up with Google and become an expert in AI just to help customers find you. That is why we built Bernard, an AI-assisted website and marketing platform for small businesses. He builds a new site or moves an existing one, keeps it fast and readable to search and AI tools, and looks after it. Once measuring is on, he reads your numbers each week and suggests what to do next, with a button that does it. On the Medium and Large plans he also plans your marketing every six weeks and drafts your posts, emails and pages. Everything lands on a draft you approve, for one flat price per site, so you can concentrate on what you do best, knowing your website is doing its job.

What the comparison measures. The tables below compare subscription prices. Prices alone do not capture what each tool does or how much of your own time it takes to run, so the sections after the tables cover both.

How we priced it

Every figure below is the yearly price on the company's own pricing page, read on 28 October 2026 from the UK. Where a company prices in dollars we have turned them into pounds at 75p to the dollar; your card's conversion rate, and any tax, may differ. Where there is a free plan or a promotion, we say so. A promotion is a snapshot of the day we read it: HubSpot's Starter offer was on its page on 28 October and may have changed by the time you read this.

The figures are before VAT. Squarespace adds 20% at the checkout for anyone not registered for VAT, which the Squarespace 2026 pricing, explained - what your renewal will actually cost guide works through, so its real bill is higher than shown here. The other pages do not say, so we have added nothing to them either. Bernard is not VAT-registered, so his price is the number you pay.

A maker with a growing list

She is an illustrator. She has a website, a list of 5,000 people who bought a print or signed up at a fair, and she sends two newsletters a month. She wants a few emails that go out on their own (a welcome, a thank you after an order), her Instagram, Facebook Page and LinkedIn kept alive, and some idea of what she is meant to be saying in March.

This is what the usual stacks cost her for the year.

These are comparisons of broadly similar business needs, not identical products. Some of these services include things Bernard does not do. Bernard includes planning, reading your numbers and doing the work, which these combinations do not give you without more tools or more of your own time.

The pieces, so you can check the sums: Squarespace Core is £204 a year. Squarespace's own email is £192 a year at 10,000 sends a month. Buffer's Essentials plan is $5 a month per social account paid yearly, so $180 for three, about £135. MailerLite Comfort at 5,000 subscribers is $529.20 a year, about £397. ActiveCampaign Plus at 5,000 contacts is £123 a month paid yearly, £1,476 for the year. HubSpot Professional is £81 a month per person paid yearly, £972 for the year. That is HubSpot's UK page, which prices one platform, marketing, sales and service together, per seat; HubSpot's US page prices Marketing Hub Professional differently, at $800 a month with three seats and a $3,000 onboarding fee, in dollars.

Three things on that table need saying plainly.

Squarespace with its own email is level with Medium at this size. If the site and the newsletter are all she wants, it is a perfectly good way to have them.

HubSpot's Starter plan is £7 a month per person paid yearly on a limited-time 65% off (HubSpot's dollar page adds that it is for new customers only). Starter does not include HubSpot's social tools, so she would still pay Buffer, and the stack comes to £423. While that promotion lasts, it is £77 less than Medium.

And if a newsletter is genuinely all she needs, Kit's free plan takes up to 10,000 subscribers and costs nothing. Nothing on this page beats free.

A seller with a shop and a course

He weaves. He sells kits and finished pieces from his website, runs an online course on the side, and has a list of 10,000 that he writes to twice a month. Everything above, plus somewhere to sell, plus somewhere to teach.

These are comparisons of broadly similar business needs, not identical products. Some of these services include things Bernard does not do. Bernard includes planning, reading your numbers and doing the work, which these combinations do not give you without more tools or more of your own time.

The new pieces: Squarespace's own email is £264 a year at 25,000 sends a month. MailerLite Comfort at 10,000 subscribers is $961.20 a year, about £721. ActiveCampaign Plus at 10,000 contacts is £161 a month paid yearly, £1,932 for the year. Podia's Shaker plan is $1,008 a year, about £756, and takes nothing from his sales. Kajabi Growth is $199 a month paid yearly, $2,388 for the year, about £1,791.

One exception. Squarespace can sell a course itself, through its own memberships, and then there is no Podia bill: Core, its email and Buffer come to £603. Squarespace keeps 5% of each of those sales on Core, though. Against Large at £1,000, that £397 lower subscription is used up once course sales reach about £8,000 a year (£7,940, at 5%). Below that, Squarespace's own memberships cost him less. Against Squarespace with Podia at £1,359, the same line sits at about £15,000 of course sales.

The cost the subscription comparison misses

Most of these stacks leave out the most expensive part, which is the time it takes to run them.

Someone has to read the reports, spot the pages that are not working, plan the next six weeks, write the emails, prepare the posts, keep the site working and make sure the technical details have not been forgotten. In a small business, that someone is the owner, usually on a Sunday night.

Sometimes it is a freelancer. Upwork's own page puts social media managers on its site at $14 to $35 an hour. Four hours a month of that comes to about £504 a year at the lowest rate and about £1,260 at the highest, and that covers the posts alone.

Bernard brings the tools and much of that work into one place. He reads the numbers, plans the next six weeks, drafts the emails and posts and keeps the site in order. You stay in control: everything he does lands on a draft for you to approve.

One real example, start to finish. Holistic Sleep Coaching trains sleep coaches. On 10 August 2026 Bernard's weekly read of the site's numbers noticed that Google had shown the site 54 times in the month for "sleep coach certification" and only one person had clicked. His suggestion, on the site's Analytics page: write a page that answers that search. The owner pressed the button that morning, read the draft and approved it, and the page went live the same day.

Here is what Google Search Console measured afterwards. In the four weeks before, there was no page. In the four weeks after it went live, Google showed the new page 61 times and nobody clicked. In the four weeks after that, it showed the page 187 times at an average position of 5, and 16 people visited it. The phrase Bernard started from barely moved for the site as a whole (position 21 before, 20 and then 15 after, with a click a month at most), so those visits came from the related searches the page answers. A modest result, and a real one. Nobody wrote a brief, chased a freelancer or sat down with a report to get it.

What Medium replaces

Here is what she stops paying for, and stops switching between:

• The website. Moved, rebuilt and looked after, with one site on every plan.
• The email tool. Newsletters go to her list from the same place, with automatic emails for the ordinary jobs: a welcome, a thank you after an order, a follow-up to an enquiry.
• The list and the spreadsheet beside it. Everyone who buys, signs up or fills in a form is already a contact, with tags, fields of her own and the permission they gave recorded beside them. Bernard can organise contacts and companies, record relationships and group people into audiences. He is not a sales CRM with deals, forecasting or pipelines.
• The forms plugin. Forms are part of the site and land in the same contacts.
• The blank page. A marketing plan every six weeks, and a content calendar that puts her posts, blog posts and newsletters on one calendar, drafts the posts and emails in her voice and prepares the pictures to go with them.
• The scheduler. Bernard plans, writes and prepares her social posts, she approves them and picks the day and time, and he schedules and posts them.
• The reports you never get around to reading. Once measuring is switched on, Bernard reads her numbers each week and writes a few plain sentences: how many people visited and where they came from, with at most three suggestions, each with one button that does the work on a draft. The next week he tells her what happened.
• The technical work behind the website. The site arrives optimised: fast pages, a proper phone layout, a description on every image and the labelled facts search engines read (structured data). Everything she publishes afterwards gets the same treatment, the automated accessibility check runs again every week, and every published version is kept so a change can be put back.

Large is all of that, plus a shop and courses, and Bernard takes nothing from the sales: the money goes to the seller's own Stripe account.

Starting fresh or moving across

Bernard does not need an old website to start from. If you have one, he moves it across, and the old site keeps running until you switch your address over. If you have nothing yet, go to Account, choose Add a new site, then Start from scratch. He asks you about your business in a short interview and drafts a homepage from your answers, and the rest of the site grows a page at a time. Nothing goes live until you approve it.

What Bernard deliberately does not do

If any of these is the thing you need, one of the tools above is the better home.

There is no free-form automation builder. The automatic emails are set types for common jobs, not a canvas with branches.

There are no deals, no lead scoring, no A/B tests and no text messages. If you sell to companies through a sales team, HubSpot is built for that and Bernard is not.

Opens and clicks are recorded only for readers who have agreed to it.

And there is a monthly sending allowance. It protects your sending reputation; it is not a band to be moved up.

What happens when the business grows

Almost every tool in these tables is priced by something that grows when the work is working: the size of the list, the number of emails, the number of people using it, the number of social accounts. Do well and the bill goes up.

Bernard is priced per site, not per contact. £500 a year for Medium, £1,000 for Large, or a tenth of that each month, and £200 for Small if a website, email and contacts are all you need for now. More contacts do not move the price: the list can double and the bill stays the same. The one limit is the sending allowance above.

If the business grows into a second website, such as a separate brand or a side project, room for it is £150 a year on any plan. That is an additional website, not a second product: a shop or courses on the site you already have are not a second site. Two websites on Medium come to £650 a year.

The bill is only part of the story

The tables price the subscriptions. They do not price the hours spent switching between tools, the reports nobody had time to read, or the improvements that never got made.

The other tools are good at their jobs, and for some businesses they are the better choice; this page has said where. Bernard is built on the idea that a small business should have the software and practical help using it, at a clear price that does not rise because the list grew.

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See what Bernard would do with your business. Already have a website? Paste its address and he measures it up, free, and shows you the new place before you decide anything. Starting from nothing? Tell him what you are building.