Strikingly Selling Fees, Prepay Deals & Actual Costs: 2026 Guide

The plan price is clean, and for a plain site that is the whole story. FREE costs nothing, PRO is $20, and VIP is $59 a month. What the plan number leaves out is the selling fee. If you use Strikingly's built-in store, FREE takes a 5 percent cut of every sale, PRO takes 2 percent, and only VIP drops it to zero. So for anyone selling, the fee is the real cost, and it disappears only on the top tier. The Strikingly plan grid shows the tiers behind it.

A domain and email are billed apart from the plan. A custom domain is $24.95 a year, free for the first year on PRO and VIP, then charged at the standard rate. A custom email address is $25 a year and requires an active domain. Once the first-year domain lapses, a branded PRO site carries roughly $50 a year in these extras on top of the $240 plan.

The saving that offsets some of this is time. Strikingly rewards commitment: two-year, three-year, and five-year prepay terms save more than a single year alone, up to about $528 over five years on a PRO baseline. Locking in years ahead is the route to the lowest effective rate. It is real money saved, but a long bet on a simple builder you may outgrow first.

Strikingly's free plan is generous on quantity and pointed on limits. It publishes unlimited sites on a strikingly.com subdomain, each with 500MB of storage and 5GB of monthly bandwidth, which is more free sites than most builders allow. The catches are prominent Strikingly branding and a 5 percent fee on anything you sell through the built-in store.

So the free tier works well for testing or for simple, non-selling pages, and poorly for a store, where that 5 percent bites on every order. To remove the branding and cut the fee to 2 percent you need PRO at $20 a month, and to reach a zero selling fee you need VIP at $59. Comparing builders on free plans alone only measures demos. See what rivals ask for their paid tiers on the Strikingly alternatives page.

Strikingly publishes no student, nonprofit, or startup rate, and its pages showed none when checked in July 2026. No codes exist to hunt for, and no enterprise tier invites a negotiation. The durable saving is length of commitment. Prepaying two, three, or five years lowers the effective monthly rate well below the standard one, up to roughly $528 over five years on PRO.

The other lever is honest tier choice around the selling fee. If you sell nothing, PRO's fee never applies and it is a fine value at $20. If you sell steadily, the 2 percent on PRO can quietly exceed the gap to VIP, which removes the fee. With fixed prices and nobody at a sales desk, the deal is one you build yourself. The ways to pay less below set out the prepay and tier choices that actually move the bill.

Strikingly has set prices and no sales desk, so nothing is negotiated. The savings come from three choices you make yourself. How long you prepay, which tier matches how much you sell, and whether you buy the domain and email through Strikingly or elsewhere all move real money on a store.

The moves below cover the common cases. A non-selling site optimizes on prepay and tier, while a store has to weigh the selling fee against the jump to VIP. Both matter, and both are decisions you settle at checkout rather than deals you ask for.

Strikingly runs no seasonal offers, so the timing question is about commitment and sales, not the calendar. The prepay discount rewards signing a longer term, but only once you are confident the builder fits, since the saving is lost if you leave mid-term. So the right moment to prepay is after a few months confirm Strikingly is a keeper.

For a store, the trigger is the selling fee crossing the tier gap. Track your monthly sales, and when PRO's 2 percent starts costing more than the $39 step to VIP, move up. Time that switch to the point the math flips rather than in anticipation, so you never pay VIP for a store that has not grown into it.

Strikingly sets its prices and staffs no sales lane, so bargaining is off the table entirely. Your control runs to the prepay length, the tier, and where you source the domain and email. For a store, the tier choice against the selling fee is where the real money moves.

No rep answers the phone and no coupon field exists, so a lower Strikingly bill comes from prepay length, tier fit, and where you buy the extras. Four moves cover it, and the biggest depends on how much you sell, since the selling fee is the cost the plan price never shows.

The order helps. Decide whether you sell at all first, since that determines whether the tier gap to VIP matters. Then settle the prepay term on a builder you are confident you will keep.

Each of these comes from Strikingly's selling fee and its separate domain and email lines, and each is simple to dodge before you buy in.

With no tier to bargain over, the useful move is checking what else covers a simple site or small store for less. These three land close on what a small owner cares about: easy building, a store, and price. Every figure comes from our verified catalog, and a quick trial reveals the true all-in cost. The full field sits on the Strikingly alternatives page.