What Wix's Free Plan Includes (and What It Doesn't)

Wix's free plan gives you a real, publishable website with a working editor, but it lives on a Wix-branded subdomain, carries Wix ads, and caps storage and bandwidth well below any paid tier — and you can't accept payments on it at all. Here's exactly what's included and what's not, sourced from Wix's own help center, checked September 2026.

What address does a free Wix site actually get?

Every free Wix site publishes to a Wix-owned subdomain, not a domain of your own. Wix's help center states the format directly: "Your free Wix URL is in the format: siteprefix.wixsite.com/siteaddress" (Wix, "Keeping the Free Wix URL", checked September 2026). You can customize both the site prefix and the site address portion, so the URL isn't random, but it's still permanently a wixsite.com address rather than a domain you own.

Wix's guide to building for free confirms the same thing from the setup side: "It will be available online with the Wix free URL in the form: siteprefix.wixsite.com/siteaddress" (Wix, "Building a Website for Free", checked September 2026), and states plainly what it takes to change that: "Connecting a custom domain requires upgrading to a plan" (same source). There's no way to point your own domain at a free Wix site — a custom domain is a paid-plan feature, full stop.

Do Wix ads show up on a free site?

Yes. Wix's own help center describes upgrading from free to Premium as the way to remove them: "By upgrading with a plan you can connect a custom domain and remove Wix ads from your site, get more storage for your media, accept online payments, and access a suite of marketing solutions" (Wix, "Upgrading Your Wix Site", checked September 2026). That sentence is really the whole free-vs-paid picture in one line: a custom domain, ad removal, more storage, payment acceptance, and marketing tools are all things you're missing on the free plan and gaining the moment you upgrade.

How much storage and bandwidth does the free plan get?

Wix's help center states the limit directly: "Free Wix sites come with up to 500MB of storage and up to 1GB bandwidth" (Wix, "About Storage and Bandwidth", checked September 2026). Its guide to building for free repeats the same figures: "You'll enjoy 500MB storage and 1GB bandwidth" (Wix, "Building a Website for Free"). Both numbers are fixed on the free plan — Wix's storage-and-bandwidth page shows every paid tier increasing storage (2 GB and up) and moving to unlimited bandwidth, so bandwidth in particular is a hard, metered cap only on the free plan.

For a site with more than a handful of images or any video, 500 MB fills up faster than it sounds — check your actual media usage in the dashboard before assuming the free plan has headroom for a growing site.

Can I accept payments or sell anything on the free plan?

No. Wix's own documentation is consistent that accepting payments requires an upgrade: "you can add and set up Wix Stores for free, but before customers can place orders, you need to upgrade your site to a plan that allows you to receive payments" (Wix Help Center, "Upgrading Your Site's Plan", checked September 2026). You can build out a store's structure — products, pages, layout — on the free plan, but a customer can't actually check out and pay until you upgrade to a plan that supports it.

What can I actually do on the free plan, then?

Despite the limits above, the free plan isn't a locked demo — it's a working version of the real Wix Editor. You get:

• The full drag-and-drop editor, so you can build and rearrange a complete site.
• Access to Wix's template gallery to start from a design, covered in more depth in our guide to how Wix templates work.
• A publishable, shareable site at your wixsite.com address, which stays usable even if you later upgrade and connect a custom domain — Wix's own guidance confirms the free URL keeps working after you add a paid domain, not just before.
• Enough functionality to fully build and test a site's structure, content, and layout before deciding whether to pay for a domain and the features that come with it.

What's the actual upgrade path if I outgrow the free plan?

There's no partial upgrade that keeps you on the free tier with one feature unlocked — moving to any Premium plan removes the ads, opens up a custom domain, raises your storage and bandwidth ceiling, and enables payment acceptance together, per the same "Upgrading Your Wix Site" guidance cited above. If a custom domain or accepting payments is the actual blocker for your project, that's the point at which the free plan stops being viable, since neither is available at any level on it.

Where does Figment fit in?

Not directly for this decision — Figment isn't a Wix alternative in the free-plan-limits sense above. Figment's own free tier works differently: unlimited sites on figment.so with a badge, rather than a storage or bandwidth cap, since Figment publishes a design from Figma through its Figma plugin rather than hosting a drag-and-drop builder with a CMS and app marketplace. If what you actually need is Wix's editor, template gallery, or app marketplace, Wix's own plans are the right comparison — including checking Wix Studio's pricing if your use case is closer to an agency or client-site workflow than a single personal site.

Bottom line: Wix's free plan is a genuine, working website — full editor, real template gallery, a publishable address — but it's built to nudge you toward upgrading: a wixsite.com subdomain with no path to a custom domain, visible Wix ads, a 500 MB storage and 1 GB bandwidth ceiling, and no way to accept payments at any point. If your project needs your own domain or the ability to take a payment, the free plan won't get you there, and every one of those gaps closes at once the moment you upgrade to a Premium plan.