DrryvsSquarespace

Drry vs Squarespace

A warmer home for your community, without the cut.

Squarespace builds beautiful sites, and it will happily sell memberships and courses from one. What it also does is take a percentage of them, and the cheaper the plan the bigger the cut: the rate falls as you climb and reaches zero only on the dearest plan. Drry takes 0% of member payments on every plan including the free one, and the money lands in your own Stripe account.

Start free, no cardFree forever to start. No credit card.

SquarespaceDrry

Payment feeEntry plan0%

Starts atPaid onlyFree

Funnels includedPartialYes

Own your StripePartialYes

Why our fee is 0% on every plan, and what it covers

Side by side

Drry vs Squarespace, the full picture

	Drry	Squarespace
Free plan	Yes. 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses, and the community feed. No card.	No free plan. A 14-day free trial, then a monthly website subscription whether or not anybody has paid you yet.
Fee on your member payments	0%. You keep 100%, only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.	A transaction fee that starts on the entry plan and falls as the plan gets dearer, reaching zero only on the top plan. A site with no digital products plan pays the steepest rate of all. And the same company charges a LOWER rate on the same entry plan for shipping a physical product, and drops that one to zero a plan sooner, so selling a membership costs several times what selling a mug does.
Courses + community together	Both built in, in one branded space you own.	Courses and member sites are genuinely built in, and they are the reason people pick it. What the member-site documentation describes is content you publish and they read: a feed of their own, with threads, replies and mentions, is not part of it.
Step-by-step guides and how-tos	Built in and free on every plan, with no cap on how many: build a guide from rich-text steps with images and video you upload to Drry and stream, a what-you-need list with real amounts and units members tick off as they go, and chips like prep time or servings, all on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Because the amounts are structured, a member can scale a recipe to a different serving count or switch between metric and US, and they can keep the screen awake while they follow it or print the whole thing. Flip any guide public and it gets one shareable link, published with recipe details a search engine can read, plus a QR code, a lead-capture form and your own call to action, and you can hold the last steps back behind an email if you want it to work as a lead magnet too.	You can lay a how-to out beautifully, because laying things out is what this product is for. What you are laying out is a page rather than a format that knows it is a how-to: the supplies list is text you typed, so nothing scales a recipe by servings, switches it between metric and US, or lets a member tick items off as they go.
Funnels + landing pages	Built in: compose landing pages from proven sections, capture leads with email boxes and embeddable forms, and see views, joins, and revenue per funnel. 1 free, unlimited on paid plans.	Landing pages are a real strength and you can build them properly. A funnel in the reporting sense is thinner: you see site and page traffic rather than views, joins and revenue attributed to one page you built.
Your own brand and domain	Your own address like grace.drry.com on free; connect your own domain plus site white label (no Drry branding, the site is 100% yours) on paid plans, and on Growth your email sends from your own domain too.	One of the best answers in this list. Your own domain, included for the first year on annual billing, and a site that looks entirely yours with no platform branding to remove.
Knowing who is showing up	See who is showing up, who is drifting away, which content people love, and how many finish each course. Included on Creator ($29/mo).	Site analytics are strong: traffic, sources, popular pages, sales. What they describe is visitors rather than members, so who is drifting away, who finished a course, and what each person has paid you over time are not the questions they are built to answer.
Where pricing starts	Free, then $29/mo (Creator), $99/mo (Growth).	Paid from day one after the trial, and the pricing decision is really about the fee: the cheapest plan is the one that takes the largest cut of your member payments, and the plan that takes none is the dearest.
Getting paid for 1:1s and packages	Send any client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before they pay, built in, free on every plan, 0% platform fee. Most platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool.	Squarespace sells one-time and subscription products, and Squarespace Scheduling handles appointments as its own subscription alongside the website plan. An agreement the client signs before they pay, in the same checkout, is not something the commerce documentation describes.
Email your members	Built in on every plan: send a broadcast to your whole community or to an audience your forms captured (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth, and new-content emails to members unmetered on top). Creator adds automations: a library of ready-made journeys that welcome new signups, deliver a lead magnet, fill an event, and win back quiet members on their own.	Email Campaigns is built by Squarespace and it is decent, and it is billed as its own subscription on top of the website plan. So emailing the members you are already paying a percentage on is a third line on the bill.
Selling digital downloads	Built in on every plan, free up to 10 products and unlimited from Creator: sell any file (PDF, video, audio, zip) straight from your bio link, keep 100% of it, and buyers get an instant download plus a receipt with the link. You keep their email, so a one-off buyer becomes someone you can actually reach again.	Yes, and well: files, courses and memberships all sell from the same site. They are also all classed as digital products, which is exactly the category the transaction fee applies to.
Audio and private podcast feeds	An audio library on every plan including free: upload a track and members get a real player with 0.75x to 2x speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls. Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member, which you switch on if you want it, so your library also plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts, downloaded for offline and unlisted in every directory. And you still see which members listened and which finished, which a podcast feed on its own can never report.	Audio embeds on a page, and Squarespace hosts a public podcast properly, with its own RSS feed for Apple Podcasts. The gated version is ruled out by that same documentation: a podcast in a member site or behind a paywall cannot be submitted to Apple Podcasts at all, so a private per-member feed is not a thing you can build here.
Letting clients book a call with you	Built in and free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator): publish your session types, share one link, and a booked time becomes a real private session on the same calendar your classes run on, with the invite, the reminders, the joining link, and cancellation all handled. Availability is yours to shape (weekly hours with split ranges, a buffer after, minimum notice, how far ahead, caps per day and per week, days off), anything already on your calendar closes its own slot, intake can be one of your real forms, and the person who booked becomes a contact you can email or drop into an automation. From Creator the call can happen in your own branded room, recorded when you press record, instead of on someone else's link.	Squarespace Scheduling, which came from Acuity, is a genuinely good booking product. It is also its own subscription alongside the website plan, and the booking lives in that tool rather than on one calendar beside your classes and sessions.
Members messaging each other, and you	Direct messages built in on every plan including free, 1:1 and in groups: images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, and blocking. Group threads are yours and your admins' to start. Your side is a real inbox, not a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your own private notes about them. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge. Messages are a switch in your Studio, on by default for new communities.	A contact form reaches you, and you can let readers comment on a blog post. Members messaging each other, or a coach inbox with saved replies and what that person has paid you beside the thread, is not something the member-site documentation describes.
What each member is worth to you	Lifetime revenue per person, free on every plan including free: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale that person has settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your message inbox, and in the CSV you export. Refunded product orders and unsettled payment links are left out. It is not a report you have to go and run, and it is not saved for a top tier: it is just there, next to their name.	Commerce reporting shows sales and, for stores, customer revenue over time. A lifetime figure per member sitting next to their name across the member list, their profile and an export is a membership report rather than a store one, and the membership is the half Squarespace keeps lighter.
Drip, prerequisites, and quizzes	Drip release, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, all three free on every plan including free, and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it, and gate whole modules and whole courses the same way. Add multiple-choice quizzes with a pass mark you choose, and make a lesson wait on the prerequisites it depends on. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are not merely hidden: the routes that serve them refuse, so there is no URL to guess your way past.	Courses have chapters and lessons in an order, and members see their progress. The help centre's own answer on quizzes is to build one out of accordion blocks, where the question is the title and the answer is the text underneath, so nothing is graded and there is no pass mark. Drip release timed off a join date and prerequisites that hold a lesson shut are not described anywhere in the course documentation.
Selling more than one membership level	Membership tiers on Growth ($99/mo): run a Basic, a Pro and a VIP out of one community, and decide per course, per room, per session and per collection of audio or guides who each one is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still SEES what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, because a locked card is what sells the upgrade; genuinely private rooms can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so you can write to "VIP and up" without keeping the list by hand.	Yes, and this is a real strength: run several membership plans at different prices and put different content behind each, with free, one-time and subscription pricing all available. Each one carries the same percentage, so a second level is a second thing paying the cut.
Captions and transcripts, unmetered	Every lesson video and every audio track is transcribed for you automatically, free on every plan including the free one, with no AI credits to buy and no add-on to switch on. On a video the captions are one tap away on the player's CC button; an audio track gets a panel members can search, where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. The machine mishears your own vocabulary the same way every time, so you correct it once in the editor, and a corrected transcript is never overwritten by a later machine pass.	Captions are real, and they are YouTube's or Vimeo's: you turn them on for a video you embedded from there, having made them somewhere else. Transcripts are the same story, something the accessibility guidance tells you to write and add. Nothing is transcribed for you, so there is nothing generated to search or tap through.
Keeping the space safe	On Growth, an AI screen reads a post before your members do and holds anything that trips the policy YOU set: eight categories you switch on or off one at a time, a strictness you choose, and your own house rules in your own words, all landing in a review queue where you approve or remove. It fails open on purpose, so an outage at the model never stops your community talking. Growth can screen direct messages the same way, into the same queue. On every plan, free included, you still get the ordinary controls: your own categories, inline moderation for you and your admins, and members deleting their own posts.	Blog comment moderation, with a spam filter and rules you set. Because there is no member feed, that is the whole surface: nothing reads a post before your members see it, because there is no members' post to read.

Details reflect each platform's publicly stated model and can change. Check current terms before deciding.

Why switch

Moving off Squarespace is easier than staying.

Keep your margin

On Drry, every member payment stays yours on every plan, including free. 0% platform cut; only Stripe's standard processing fee applies.

One tool, not five

Courses, community, payments, and funnels in one place, your brand on all of it. No bolt-on page builders or separate apps.

You own the rails

Your own Stripe account and member list. Leaving never means starting over, because your customers were always yours.

Why creators pick Drry

Keep 100% of member payments. Only Stripe's standard processing fee applies, we take nothing on top.
Payments run through your own Stripe account, so your customers and subscriptions belong to you, not the platform. No payment lock-in.
Funnels built in: fast landing pages on your domain with views, joins, and revenue attributed per page. Standalone funnel tools charge $49 to $97 a month for less.
A genuinely free tier: 100 members, 5 GB storage, unlimited courses, and the community feed, with no card required.
Courses, a community feed, members, and payments in one branded space you own.
Step-by-step guides built in and free on every plan, with no cap: rich-text steps with images and native video, a what-you-need list members tick off, on a tab you can rename to Recipes, Workouts, or Protocols. Flip any one of them public and it becomes a shareable, search-indexable how-to page with a QR code, a lead-capture form, and your call to action, so the same guide serves your members and brings you new ones.
Your own address like grace.drry.com out of the box, with custom domain and site white label on paid tiers, and white-label email from your own domain on Growth.
Member analytics on the $29 Creator plan: who is showing up, what is landing, and who is quietly drifting away. The kind of insight other platforms save for their priciest plans.
Get paid for 1:1s and packages: send a client a one-time or installment link with an agreement they sign before paying. Built in, free on every plan, and no platform fee. Other platforms make you bolt on a separate contract tool, and most never reach 0%.
Let clients book you without a second subscription: publish your session types and share one link, free on every plan (2 session types on free, unlimited from Creator). A booked time becomes a real session on the same calendar your classes run on, so the invite, the reminders, and cancellation come with it, and anything already on that calendar closes its own slot. From Creator the call can happen in a room of your own instead of on someone else's link, and either way the person who booked becomes a contact you can follow up, by hand or automatically. Standalone schedulers hand you a time and an email address and stop there.
Bring your list with you, and take it back out whenever you want. Import your contacts from a CSV in the browser (we check every address before it lands, so a bad list never touches your sending reputation), and export the whole audience on any plan including free. Most platforms make leaving quietly difficult; we would rather you stay because it is working.
Audio your members can actually take with them: the library is free on every plan, with a player that does speed, a sleep timer, resume, and lock-screen controls, and Growth adds a private, revocable podcast feed per member so the same library plays in Apple Podcasts or Overcast, offline and listed in no directory. Most platforms cap audio or send you to a second paid product to do this, and the ones that do have feeds cannot tell you who actually listened. We can, because the web player stays primary and the feed is additive.
Email your whole community, built in on every plan, even free (700 sends a month on free, 60,000 on Creator, 500,000 on Growth), no add-on and no second tool to wire up. Creator adds email automations: welcome journeys, lead-magnet delivery, and win-backs that run on their own.
Give a journey a goal, and it stops chasing people who already did the thing. Set the goal to paying, or active in the community, or holds a tag, and every enrolled person is re-checked against it each time the journey comes back to them, instead of marching to the end of a script written weeks ago. It also applies to people who are already partway through: the goal is read fresh every time, not frozen into their journey the day they entered, so one you add today reaches them at their next step rather than only catching people who start after you.
Members can message each other and you, 1:1 or in a group you or an admin starts, on every plan including free. Images and files, reactions, unsend your own message, blocking. Your side is a real inbox rather than a notification list: saved replies you fire with a slash, and beside a one-to-one thread that person's lifetime revenue, tags, join date, and your private notes. On Growth you can switch on optional AI screening that flags a worrying message into your moderation queue for you to judge.
Lifetime revenue per member, free on every plan, so you can see what each person is actually worth: every membership charge, payment link, and product sale they have settled adds up on their row in your members list, on their profile, beside their name in your inbox, and in your CSV export. Not a report you go and run, and not a feature saved for a top tier: just a number next to their name, so you know who to look after.
Drip, prerequisites, and graded quizzes, free on every plan and enforced on the SERVER rather than hidden in the interface. Release a lesson a set number of days after someone joins, on a fixed date, or a set number of days after they finish what comes before it; gate whole modules and whole courses the same way; set the pass mark on a quiz yourself. A locked lesson's video, transcript, attachments, and body are refused by the routes that serve them, so there is no URL to guess your way past. Most platforms put course release controls on a paid tier, if they have them at all.
Captions and transcripts written for you, free on every plan including the free one, and never metered. Publish a lesson video, an audio lesson or an audio track and we transcribe it: captions on the video player's CC button, and for audio a panel members can search where every line is a tap to that second, next to chapters you named yourself. Correct the machine's wording once in the editor and we never overwrite it. Where the bigger suites have this, it tends to arrive on an upper plan or against a monthly allowance of AI credits you top up.
Sell more than one membership level out of ONE community, on Growth: a Basic, a Pro and a VIP, with per-course, per-room, per-session and per-collection control over who each is for. Everything you leave open stays open to everyone. A lower tier still sees what it does not have, marked with what unlocks it, so your own library does the upselling; a genuinely private room can be hidden outright instead. Your email audiences split the same way, so "VIP and up" is a rule rather than a list you maintain by hand. The usual alternative is running a second community, with its own members, its own posts and its own bill.

Drry vs Squarespace, questions

How much does Squarespace take from a membership?

It depends entirely on the plan, and this is the number most comparisons leave out. Squarespace files member sites, courses and memberships under digital products and charges a transaction fee on them, steepest on the entry plan and falling to zero only on the dearest. A site with no digital products plan pays more than any of them. That is on top of the monthly website subscription, and it is charged before payment processing takes its own cut. The current rates and the date we checked them are on this page.

Is Drry a free Squarespace alternative for memberships?

For the membership half, yes. Drry has a free plan with 100 members, 5 GB, unlimited courses and the community feed, with no card and no trial countdown, and it takes 0% of member payments on every plan including that one. Squarespace is a general website builder and Drry is not, so if what you need is a portfolio or a brochure site then Squarespace is the better tool, and running the shopfront there while the paid membership lives here is a perfectly sensible split.

Why does Squarespace charge more for a membership than for a product?

Only Squarespace can answer why, but both rates are published and they are different. On the entry plan a physical store sale carries a smaller cut than a membership or a course does, and the store rate reaches zero one plan sooner than the digital one. Whatever the reasoning, the effect is that the thing creators sell is the thing that costs most to sell there.

Can I move from Squarespace to Drry?

Members and contacts export as a CSV and import into Drry, and your course content moves over as lessons. Existing subscriptions have to be recreated wherever you move them, so plan the switch and tell your members before it happens. Many people keep the Squarespace site as their public shopfront and move only the paid membership, which keeps the part Squarespace is best at.

Make the switch

Try Drry free. Bring your people.

Spin up your branded space in minutes, courses and community together, and keep 100% of what your members pay you.

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