When a company gets greedy, customers look for new tools.

Plus: Geek Breakfast returns? Maybe...

Hi Nice Maker,

Are you in Nashville? Would you like to meet up for breakfast with a small group of tech-minded folks? I’m kicking around an idea to reboot Geek Breakfast. If you’ve been reading me for a while, you’ll be familiar, but for now, just let me know either way.

For years, we hammered nails with a screwdriver.

For years, we hammered nails with a screwdriver, and then LLMs came along. You could whack the nails hard enough to do the job fine. For most of us, this was enough. For others, they didn't know about hammers yet or how to use them.

More and more, we humans are doing this to ourselves. Case in point, Squarespace. I was a satisfied customer, but they made me look for a hammer, and so I found one.

Squarespace just increased my annual fee by 26% ($276 to $348), which adds up when you run multiple websites on the platform. This also isn't the first time things have increased, and a Google search for "𝘚𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘦" is all you need to see about their current customers' sentiment. Spoiler alert: people are pissed off.

I contacted Support to politely inquire about the increase and share that it's unacceptable; I would take my business elsewhere if there's nothing they can do, and no, I'm not a jerk customer.

In my message to Squarespace support, I emphasized that 𝗜 𝘄𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗳𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿 and continue to sing their praises as I have for the last ten-plus years. I like Squarespace, but we aren't married.

The customer support person replied with a form message suggesting I downgrade my Pro account to a Personal one, which obviously doesn't suit my needs. That's it; that was the reply. 𝘋𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘭𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘪𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘰𝘶𝘵, 𝘋𝘢𝘷𝘦!

I spent this weekend with a couple of hammers, Claude and Gemini, and after tinkering with Cloudflare and GitHub (both practically free services for my needs), I rebuilt the website, which now loads way faster (which should help with SEO) and is ready to go when my annual subscription expires and I cancel my account.

I plan to do the same for all of my websites I host with Squarespace. I didn't want it to come to this; I was happy to hit nails with a screwdriver, but they got greedy, and so, like other customers, I was forced to turn to new options.

An additional note. If you're not interested in learning how to use technical hammers (hitting your thumb kills!), there are other services that might be good options for you, like WordPress, Elementor, Framer, Webflow, and others.

Leave a comment if you know of other hosting options, or if you're a Squarespace customer, I'm curious how you're feeling about this.

Have a nice week,

Dave.