Start exploring Pika, Bear Blog and Pagecord from Squarespace

Software
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2025.9.30 Update:

  • More details on Pika and Bear Blog are here. Pagecord is added as well.
  • Emailed to the three providers and got replies. Refer to here.

I joined Squarespace from 2016 from Wordpress because of its beautiful websites and drag and drop building features. During almost a decade when iPad has been improving, Squarespace is becoming more bloated and online sale oriented.

My contract renews every May. Two years ago I actively moved from their v7.0 to 7.1 by rebuilding my website from scratch, and they refunded me partially for my old website and I paid for new. They do have their app, but I found no matter on desktop or mobile, the experience is more and more frustrating. Especially this year when I am more determined to write more blog articles, my time spent on writing is like an hour whereas pasting words and uploading images can end up 1.5 to 2 hours, which is more than simply writing and editing!

When I look back my emails, I started from US$96/year, to nowadays 192, which is double! This year they have a new pricing plan with basic plan unchanged with more selling features, while drastically increasing the higher tiers (like from 50 to 90? per month?). For me I can’t find any value when I am able to monetise. Because website itself can’t easily encourage people to purchase unless I am so famous.

Just before renewal, I noticed Bear Blog and Pika. I didn’t switch at that time because I couldn’t rush. Until these days I began testing them.

Bear Blog is very lightweight! And CSS and some codes can customise my website, while Pika strives a balance between customisation and convenience. Especially when people don’t know much about Markdown, Pika is highly recommended.

Both platforms are being used by their founders, which is a kind of skin in the game. Pika is under Good Enough with four co-founders who have illustration/artist background so besides some online services they also publish paper zines. On my website they create a guestbook for visitors to doodle, which is a lot of fun!

I haven’t tried thoroughly on Bear Blog because the free tier doesn’t include image attachments, while Pika allows it just limited to 50 posts.

Maybe you say you can earn money on Squarespace with donations and products. I can tell you I spent half an hour to add a donation column not because I am perfectionist but their drag and drop is so annoying that I have to adjust everything around it.

I wish Squarespace allows prorated refund but unfortunately they don’t. It’s US$192 vs $60 (or £144 vs 45): besides the big difference, £100 won’t make my life easier and happier, ironically saving can!

But I can’t regret renewing my Squarespace without switching to Pika earlier because I still have to carefully choose my alternatives.

The only complaint may be that the two service providers do not have two-factor authentication to protect accounts.

On my subscriptions

This year I have been switching to many other better services (with lower costs), but obviously not because I am attracted by shiny new products or services, but my needs having not to be addressed.

  • From Apple Notes to Obsidian: after a whole month I have no intention to go back, and I no longer visit Reddit or other social media to seek advices.
  • From Safari to Brave: Although I still mainly stay on Safari, I am making use of Brave playlists replacing Apple Music because I don’t have much demands on music streaming services: just playing my few favourite songs on the background is enough.
  • From MUBI GO: I think going to cinemas very week is great, but I have subscribed for two years so I will reallocate my time to free Kanopy from my library, and read more ebooks from Libby app (my library too).
  • From Squarespace: it’s coming soon and I think I will make it happen earlier.

So right now I have only three subscriptions left:

  1. iCloud 2TB (US$144 or ÂŁ108/year)
  2. Strava (US$72 or ÂŁ54/year)
  3. Squarespace (US$192 or ÂŁ144/year)

My current website and Pika

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I love your illustrations. I also read your London to Reigate blog. That is a run through my youth, although some of the places (Croydon, Purley and Redhill) have changed almost beyond recognition.

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I’m very interested in this discussion. I use Squarespace for my blog, and I’m facing similar issues: price increases and a sales-oriented approach.

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4

This really shocked me!

Quite a price compared to some fictional number I had in my head of what this sort of stuff costs!

Have you thought about self hosting a WordPress instance on Vultr/Digital Ocean/Hetzner etc? Most of these have quite easy one-click deployment/install options now!

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This is already the basic price, and there are three more levels (US$23, 39, 99/month respectively) because they thought when people are working hard in selling things users can earn more and upgrade. A kind of hedonic treadmill.

I tried Wordpress.org a decade ago, with Bluehost. The first year was usually very cheap, but the normal price is not.

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I’m moving away from WordPress as fast as I can, because of the increasing bloat and large numbers of malware/scripts/bad actors targetting WordPress sites. I’m using Pika and Posthaven, and plan to move my two largest and decades-old sites to Ghost when I have a little breathing space.

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I also found Pagecord which is from Edinburgh, UK. The price, according to what I found, used to be US$20/year, now it’s 29 which is still cheaper than the two I mentioned.

There are more options but I don’t want to test more atm.

Of the three options, Bear Blog has the longest history of 5 years. Both Bear Blog and Pagecord are solo businesses, from Herman in Cape Town and Olly from Edinburgh. Pika is from a small team Good Enough in the US with 6 persons who have had experiences with online services from small team communication (Jelly) to contact form like Letterbird.

Bear Blog

Bear Blog has its roadmap and Herman did think deeply about his services like not selling to VC, and aiming for longevity. Although it’s still in thinking stage, the blog service has been at least five years, and I believe the trust is building.

The main website looks so simple but there are variety of themes to choose, and the code-based interface, although many may not love it, empowers users a lot of opportunities to make their own. Once you build it, you won’t continue spending time to choose this and that. The blog interface is not bad indeed.

Yes, it’s also Markdown based, and the editor is not WYSIWYG, but makes us easy to copy and paste from Markdown apps like Obsidian and iA Writer.

As he is living in Cape Town, where the price level is comparatively low, the current price of US$5/month, $49/year with $189 lifetime should be fair to both.

Pika

Good Enough is an interesting company. The team is able to build good branding, easy-to-use blog platform and various nice services, while they once published paper zines before, making me think some of them are illustrators or artists.

The company size and nature is like Shiny Frog from Italy who owns Bear note taking app. Although they are different, they are both creating something playful!

The blog is WYSIWYG while supporting pasting from Markdown. You can also drag and drop from apps like Obsidian. They don’t have roadmap but they have their own records of what they improved, like embedded YouTube and even Apple Music playlists.

Besides playful and happy experiences, the team has their strengths to integrate their services into the blog, like Letterbird contact form, and guestbooks allowing visitors to doodle. Currently you don’t need to pay extra.

I believe they can provide two-factor authentication because they already made one on Jelly.

The service started beta at the end of 2023 and launched in early 2024, which has much shorter history compared to Bear Blog. It’s also difficult to tell if they will create an ecosystem that encourages or requires users to pay more, like what Squarespace is doing to ask people to add newsletters and upgrade; and we will never know if there will be VC or acquisition. But what is sure is the team is phrasing out their accounts on major social media like X and Threads, keeping Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

Pagecord

It’s an indie service like Bear Blog. Login every time needs authentication through email. Editor is WYSIWYG without any Markdown support (Note: I emailed him and he said he was building it. Beta stage). They don’t have monthly subscription but yearly $29 which is competitive with Pika and Bear Blog at this moment, but they increased their price once from 20.

I also took some time to find out the background when they only said they are independent. In the main page there is a link from Olly, who creates Pagecord, and you will find his name after registration.

Pagecord has been developed since Mar 2024, just two months after Pika but seems it isn’t as popular as Pika. The paid plan includes image attachment, custom domain, favicon, brand removal, analytics.

There should be the similar image gallery like Pika, and pages but you can’t choose any to be your home page (yet?)

Wrap up

I am a person who stress transparency and background, as these information allows me to determine if the service is trustworthy, although they won’t guarantee the future.

Bear Blog is easy to understand because Herman has much documentation about that, and the time (five-year history) can tell a bit. While Pika has the foundation and experience from their other services to make their blog services great and neat. I think Pagecord can be more transparent.

Account security (and emailed to the owners), as of 2 October 2025

As Bearblog and Pika do not have 2FA (2-factor authentication), I emailed them if they have plans to implement.

Pika replied “a few people have asked for 2FA, so it is something we’re keeping in mind as a possibility in the future. However, we don’t have any immediate plans to implement it.”

I just emailed Bear so I will have to wait.

As Pagecord has already had email verification every login (just type the username and email so that the platform sent an email for users to click the link provided, no password needed), which for me may not be as ideal as 2FA but is better than just name and password which can be hacked, I emailed Olly, the owner, about the possibility of Markdown and branding removal. He said Markdown is in beta at this moment because under the hook the blog is in the form of HTML. Branding removal is possible in the paid plan although the website didn’t say.

I haven’t got any replies from Bear Blog! Herman, the owner replied on 2 October. Check here!

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Wordpress is a mess. Maybe Wordpress.com is better but as it doesn’t have unlimited space like Squarespace, it can be more expensive.

When I used self-hosted Wordpress.org in the past, I need to pay for the hosting, which is always attractive in the first year but the normal price is still expensive. For the theme, there are usually better from third party in which you have to pay, besides additional fees, you may have to consider the compatibility in the long run so some theme provides may need you to subscribe to make sure they can update to fix the issue.

But honestly if you just compare Squarespace to Wordpress, I will say Squarespace is overall cheaper and easier. It’s Apple version of website provider which is easy and fast at first but inevitably heading towards complexity and being bloated.

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Blot.im is also worth a look in my opinion. Really simple and effective. $6 a month per site.

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I’m currently using Squarespace for my wife’s small business and I am also concerned about the price. This is a great thread and has given me lots to think about and research. Thanks MPUsers!

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I selfhost on a VPS server; my costs are shockingly low, considering how much space I have and how much I use the server. Less than a year of Squarespace.

I was going to return to hand-coded HTML until I tested Pika Pages and Posthaven. I still have some small sites that are hand-coded. The two sites I will be moving to Ghost are image-heavy.

I started out with Radio, then Blogger, then MovableType and Textile, before moving to self-hosted WordPress in 2010. Dealing with WordPress is taking too much of my time.

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I appreciate you sharing this. Good to read about the companies.

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What’s the difference with Pika and Posthaven? Are they the same or is one better than the other?

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Pika Pages is more actively developed, and adds support for new features regularly. I use it for active blogs.

Posthaven has active support, but feature additions are slow in coming. It’s a very basic blogging system; I use it for blogs/sites that I need to keep for professional or other reasons (like class Web sites) but which I will not be adding to.

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I tried to like SquareSpace several times but always hit serious downsides.

  1. I have run, at one time or another, between 3 and 8 separate sites. On SS, that’s 3-8 times the expense!
  2. The drag and drop is great until you hit a wall. I wanted to embed Flickr images. Can’t. End of story.
  3. The price keeps going up.

I know some people have a problem with Wordpress. I’ve been using it, except for a year or two I spent on SS (with merged sites!) since you had to manually unpack the files and FTP them to the server for every upgrade.

These days I’m not keen on running a VPS - too much stress about bad actors. So I have a managed server with CloudWays. The only part I’m responsible for is Wordpress itself. Every other part of the stack is looked after for me. Wordpress self-updates now, for the most part. It’s very little effort to occasionally log in and check on any theme updates or major WP versions.

I used to post to WP using MarsEdit and I’ve tried posting from Ulysses. Both of these worked pretty well, but I prefer to just write in the admin interface. Which works just fine on an iPad. The WP interface now has the block editor. It’s not as powerful as SS’s but it’s more than enough for most blogs, I think.

Sure, if the whole Mullenweg thing concerns you, maybe WP isn’t the best choice. But where above there was mention of “5 years” being a pretty good stretch for trust… well WP has been going a wee bit longer than that, and it has steadily improved.

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Why are you not considering Wordpress.com?

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As I said here wordpress.com doesn’t have unlimited storage. If I keep writing blogposts with photos I will get it full.

Squarespace only limits the number of pages while blog counts only one, and they allow online stores even in basic plan now.

But the blog publication is so painful and many features are not iPad friendly.

New blog platforms like Pika and Bearblog are easier, but the account security is so weak (username and password only).

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I have nothing of interest to add to the conversation, but I know for sure I’ll be following @alvinc 's wonderful work wherever it appears.

Katie

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Thanks Katie! :smiling_face: I will let you know if I have a decision.

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I emailed to three owners and got two replies. Considering security and price, I may consider Pagecord first, which is $29/year (no monthly plan).