Six years on Squarespace. Roughly fifty sites under my belt, mostly small businesses around Prague and Brno, a few Berlin clients, one eccentric ceramicist in Lyon. I know the platform's quirks the way you know a familiar tram route, including the dead zones where the editor freezes if you nest sections too deep. So when a colleague kept pushing me toward Codrik, this voice-first AI builder out of Prague, I resisted for about three months before I caved. I rented an hour for 490 Kč, opened my microphone, and rebuilt a yoga studio site I'd shipped on Squarespace last spring. That earlier build took me six hours of fiddling with section padding. The Codrik version was live in 38 minutes. This is the part of the review where I'm supposed to declare a winner. I'm not going to, because the honest answer is messier and more useful than that.
What Squarespace still does better than anything
Let me get the concession out of the way first, because I'm tired of comparison posts that pretend the incumbent has no merits. Squarespace is still the right call when the client wants to self-edit afterward. Their visual editor, with all its drag-and-drop sluggishness, is genuinely teachable. I can hand a bakery owner the login and within forty minutes they're confidently swapping seasonal hero images and rewording the menu. That muscle memory matters. It's also still the right call for photographers who lean on the gallery layouts, the lightbox behavior, the proofing pages. I tried recreating a wedding photographer's portfolio in Codrik and while the layout came out gorgeous, the gallery interactions felt thinner than what Squarespace bakes in by default. And honestly, for any client running a real product catalog with inventory, variants, and tax rules across multiple regions, Squarespace Commerce Advanced at 49 dollars a month is doing work that Codrik isn't trying to compete with yet.
The yoga studio brief, told two ways
Spring 2025. A yoga studio in Vinohrady wanted a five-page site, soft palette, schedule grid, instructor bios, a Mailchimp embed for their newsletter. I quoted 14000 Kč, built it on Squarespace Personal, billed the client another 16 dollars a month for hosting on their account. Total time on my end across two weeks of feedback rounds: 6 hours and 20 minutes, mostly spent on responsive tweaking because their instructor headshots were all different aspect ratios and the section padding kept breaking on tablet width. Last month I rebuilt the same brief in Codrik as a test. I talked through the structure out loud for about four minutes, uploaded the same headshots, and the AI handled the aspect ratio normalization without me asking. Total time: 38 minutes. Cost to me: 490 Kč for the hour. The client doesn't have it yet, but if I migrate them off Squarespace and onto Codrik's optional 249 Kč a month hosting, they save roughly 130 Kč a month and I save five hours of my life next time we iterate.
The bakery rebrand, where Squarespace won
Counter-anecdote, because I don't want to oversell this. A small Karlin bakery hired me in February to refresh their site after a rebrand. New logo, new color story, eight product categories with seasonal rotation, online ordering for pickup, a blog the owner writes herself in her own voice. I tried Codrik first. The build itself was fast, maybe 45 minutes for the structure, but the client wanted to take over the blog editing immediately, and the experience of editing copy on Codrik post-launch is still rougher than Squarespace's mature editor. I migrated the project to Squarespace Business at 23 dollars a month, ate the slower build time, and the owner has shipped twelve blog posts since without my help. That's the right outcome. Codrik isn't yet the tool for clients who treat their site as an active editorial channel they own. For brochure sites that get refreshed twice a year, it's already better. For living, breathing content sites, Squarespace's editing experience is still ahead.
The economics of running a freelance practice
Here's the part nobody talks about cleanly. When I quote a Squarespace project, I'm baking in roughly 6 to 10 hours of build time at my rate, plus the client's ongoing subscription, which they'll pay for years. Across my book of fifty active client sites, that's a lot of recurring revenue going to Squarespace, none to me, and a lot of my hours spent on layout drudgery. Codrik flips both. The hourly rental at 490 Kč means a typical build costs me one hour, sometimes two if the client brief is complicated. The optional hosting at 249 Kč a month is cheaper than every Squarespace tier, and I can mark it up modestly without the client flinching. The harder honest truth is that this compresses what I can charge for a build. If I'm shipping in 38 minutes I can't keep quoting 14000 Kč with a straight face. So my pricing is shifting toward outcome packages and retainers, not hour-padded project quotes. That transition isn't comfortable, but it's where the work is going.
Voice-first as an actual workflow change
I was the most skeptical person about voice. I assumed it was a gimmick, that I'd end up typing into a chat box anyway. The first ten minutes of my first Codrik session, I was talking to my screen like an idiot, second-guessing every sentence. Then I realized I was briefing the AI exactly the way I brief a junior designer at a previous studio I worked at: structure first, then mood, then specific content, then the small fiddly bits. Talking it through is faster than dragging blocks. It also forces me to actually articulate what the client said, which surfaces the gaps in my brief before I've built around a misunderstanding. I've stopped taking client calls without Codrik open in another tab. Halfway through the call I'm already roughing out the structure live, and by the time we hang up I have something to send within the hour. Squarespace never let me work that way.
Where Codrik still annoys me
Honest grumbles, because every review post that pretends a tool is flawless is selling something. Codrik's typography defaults are tasteful but limited, and I've had to push back on the AI a few times when it kept defaulting to a clean sans across every section, even when I asked for more contrast. The post-launch editing experience, as I mentioned with the bakery, isn't where Squarespace lives yet. Integrations are thinner. If a client needs a specific scheduling tool, a niche CRM, or a Czech-specific payment gateway I haven't seen Codrik integrate cleanly, I have to do more manual stitching than I would on Squarespace. EU hosting is a real plus for my GDPR-skittish clients, but I've still hit cases where I wanted more granular control over the deployed code. None of these are dealbreakers. They're the kind of friction you accept in a tool that's two years old versus one that's twenty-two.
How I'm actually splitting work between them now
After three months of running both, my decision rule is roughly this. Brochure sites, service businesses, anything where the client mostly wants to be left alone after launch, Codrik. Speed wins, the client saves money, I make better margins. Editorial sites, blogs the owner runs themselves, photographers leveraging gallery features, mature e-commerce with real catalog complexity, Squarespace. Hybrid cases, like a service business that wants a small blog, I'm trying to keep on Codrik and seeing how the editing experience matures. The freelancers I know who are panicking about AI builders are the ones who built their pricing around hours of layout fiddling. The ones doing fine are pricing on outcomes and using whichever tool makes the outcome ship fastest. If you're searching for a Squarespace alternative for freelancers because you're tired of paying their tax on every client and burning evenings on responsive tweaks, Codrik is genuinely worth the 490 Kč to try once. If you've never used Squarespace and you're greenfield, I'd still want you to know what you're trading away. Both tools belong in a working freelancer's kit in 2026. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.