The short answer: it is almost never the price. UK website builder UENI read the 600 most recent one-star Trustpilot reviews of five platforms, including its own, gathered on 4 August 2026. Price came up in 4.2% of them. Support you could not reach, or support that could not help, came up in 42.3%. That is roughly ten complaints about being stuck on your own for every one about cost. If you are weighing a DIY builder against paying someone to build and look after your site, that ratio is the number worth sitting with before you decide.
Key takeaways
- UENI's analysis of 600 one-star Trustpilot reviews across Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Hostinger and its own platform found support failures named in 42.3% of complaints, versus 4.2% for price, a ten-to-one gap.
- 11.7% of the same reviews named an AI or a bot standing between the customer and a human, nearly three times the rate of price complaints.
- Only 3.0% said the product was hard to use, the thing every builder markets itself on.
- One-star share varies hugely by platform: Squarespace sits at 44.1% of all its reviews, GoDaddy at 9.1%, so a handful of angry reviews do not tell you the whole story either way.
- We build your website free, and Starter at £39 a month keeps us working on it. Under our Busier Guarantee you pay nothing until it is making you busier.
What people actually complain about
UENI is a website builder itself, so it had a reason to expect its research to land in its own favour, and said as much. It did not go looking for a price story. It read 150 one-star reviews each for Wix and Squarespace and 100 each for GoDaddy, Hostinger and itself, fixed the sample sizes before reading anything, then counted the themes. Support led on every single platform, at every star rating from 3.4 to 4.8. Billing complaints, when they appeared, mostly described a renewal nobody had flagged or a second-year charge that arrived with no invoice attached, a pattern that reads as surprise rather than sticker shock.
The AI-support problem
Across the same 600 reviews, 11.7% named an AI or a bot standing between them and a human being, more than double the rate of "hard to use" and nearly three times the rate of price complaints. Hostinger carried the largest share: 31% of its own one-star reviews were specifically about being handled by AI instead of a person, against 15% for Wix, 8% for GoDaddy, 5% for Squarespace and 1% for UENI. One reviewer wrote: "There is no real support, just AI repeating the same answer again and again." Most customers on every platform in the study were happy; the unhappy minority's complaint had simply changed shape, from waiting on hold to not reaching a person at all.
Not every platform earns its bad reviews equally
Read this next to the actual scores, because it changes what the numbers mean. Squarespace's one-star reviews are 44.1% of everything it has on Trustpilot, an outlier UENI itself flagged as unresolved: a platform that emails every customer for a review tends to get a healthier spread than one only unhappy people bother to rate. GoDaddy, at a 4.4 TrustScore, has one-star reviews making up just 9.1% of its total; Hostinger, at 4.7, sits at 6.7%. Most people on most of these platforms are not complaining at all. The pattern only shows up once you isolate the minority who left angry, and even then it says more about support than about the builder being hard to use.
What this means if you are choosing between a builder and a build
None of this says DIY builders are wrong for every business. What people actually regret is being on their own when something breaks, and the monthly fee rarely factors into that regret at all. If you can live without a person to call, a builder is a reasonable way to get online cheaply. If what actually matters is a real answer when a form stops working or a page will not load on a phone, that is a support relationship, not a software licence, and it is worth pricing accordingly before you pick either route.
What we build and what it costs
We hand-code every site, so there is no drag-and-drop layer for you to fight when something needs changing. If your current site's problem is technical, the speed, the phone layout, the structure, rather than the content on it, a rescue keeps your domain and rebuilds what does not work.
| Option | What it is | Price |
|---|---|---|
| New website | Five pages, hand-coded, mobile-first, written around your reviews and services | Free |
| Website rescue | Your existing site rebuilt hand-coded on your own domain and content | Free |
| Starter | Hosting, security and small changes, plus the work that brings you customers: pushing you up Google, getting you recommended by ChatGPT and the other AI assistants, and turning more visitors into bookings | £39 a month |
Both builds come with Starter, and under the Busier Guarantee you pay nothing until the site is making you busier, measured on your own Google numbers. If you would rather own the site outright, that is £299. Every price is on the pricing page.
Check what your own site actually needs
Not sure whether your current site needs a rescue or you are starting from nothing? Run it through our free scan first. It tells you which one before you spend on either.
Common questions
Is a website builder like Wix or Squarespace always the wrong choice?
No. If you can live without support when something breaks, a builder is a cheap way to get online. The regret people report is being stuck on their own; the monthly cost barely registers by comparison. Weigh that against what you can fix yourself.
Why do AI support bots show up in so many complaints?
Because they stand between the customer and a person at the exact moment something has gone wrong, which is when people want a human most. In UENI's study, Hostinger's AI-support complaints outnumbered every other platform's, at 31% of its own one-star reviews.
My site was built on a DIY builder. Can it be rescued instead of rebuilt from scratch?
Usually, yes. A rescue keeps your domain, content and search history and rebuilds what is actually broken, typically the speed, the phone layout or the structure. It is free with Starter at £39 a month, and if the site needs more than a rescue, the new build is free too.
What does the free website actually include?
Five pages hand-coded and written around your business: home, services, about, reviews and contact is the usual shape. Mobile-first, schema markup, sitemaps and click-to-call from day one, and you approve it on your phone before it goes live. Starter at £39 a month keeps us working on it after that.
Want the version of this with your name on it?
Run the free scan on your current site, 50-plus checks including AI search, no charge, or ask for your free website: we build it first, then the systems that get you booked. £39 a month keeps us working on it to bring you more customers once it’s live, and there is no obligation either way.