Building with the Wix AI builder is free; you pay for the Premium plan that puts the site on your own domain. A small trades firm needs Light ($17 a month, billed yearly) for enquiry forms, or Core ($29), the cheapest plan Wix lists for bookings and payments. Business ($39) and Business Elite ($159) are rarely needed.
Two checks before you pay. Wix localises its plan page, so the figure you see may include local tax and come out a little above the list prices quoted here ($17, $29, $39 and $159 a month on yearly billing, as of October 2026); the page says the final price appears on the purchase page before payment. And you only need Core if customers must book a time or pay a deposit on the site. If the site's job is to get a call or a quote request, Light is enough.
What the AI builder costs, and where the bill starts
The tool people mean by "Wix AI builder" is the Wix AI website builder, which Wix's page calls part of Wix Harmony, its editor that mixes prompting with drag-and-drop design. The older ADI tool was retired on 10 November 2024, according to the same page, and old ADI projects now open in the regular Wix Editor. You can start building without paying: the page says "Start for free. No credit card required". The free plan is real but limited. It keeps Wix branding and a Wix web address, and the page says you need a Premium plan to connect a custom domain. Any Premium plan includes a voucher for a free domain for one year.
AI itself is metered separately, through credits. Wix's support article on AI credits says chatting with Aria, the AI agent, is free and uses none. Credits are used by Smart Chat, the AI custom agent, the AI marketing agent, the AI phone agent and Wixel. On the free plan you can use up to 30 credits a day, to a maximum of 120 a month. On Premium plans the article gives estimated monthly actions: up to 150 on Light, 200 on Core, 300 on Business and 1,000 on Business Elite, with the AI phone agent estimated at 75, 100, 150 and 500. Premium credits renew on the date you bought the plan, unused credits do not roll over, and Wix says you cannot buy top-ups on Premium plans; you upgrade for more.
For a trades firm, the phone agent is where those numbers bite. Wix says calls use credits according to their length (silent calls and callers who hang up before speaking are not charged) and that the action counts are estimates, not guarantees. Core's average of 100 phone-agent actions a month works out at roughly three a day, and a burst-pipe caller who needs calming takes longer than a quote request. Run the arithmetic on a wet week: if 15 emergency calls arrive in a day and each one counts as at least one action, a single bad day uses about a seventh of Core's month. The article also warns that some tools run automations that spend credits without you doing anything, and advises pausing them when credits run low. Treat Wix's phone agent as light overflow cover at most, and price a dedicated receptionist service if calls are how you win work.
For the plain free-versus-paid question across any kind of business, the sibling tutorial on what is free and what needs a paid plan on the Wix AI website builder goes through it. The choice that follows, once the free build is done, is the one a trades firm has to make.
The four plans, read for a trades firm
The table combines the prices with the plan features from Wix's plan page that matter to a trades site. The 12-month column is the monthly price times 12 on yearly billing.
| Plan | Per month (yearly billing) | 12 months | Storage | Collaborators | Lead-capture forms | Bookings and payments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light | $17 | $204 | 2 GB | 2 | 4 | No |
| Core | $29 | $348 | 50 GB | 5 | 10 | Yes |
| Business | $39 | $468 | 100 GB | 10 | 25 | Yes |
| Business Elite | $159 | $1,908 | Unlimited | 100 | 75 | Yes |
All four include removal of Wix branding and a free domain for the first year. Light has no way to accept payments, no pay links or invoices and no customer accounts. Core adds payments, pay links and invoices, customer accounts, plus the scheduling-and-services features that Wix lists from Core upwards; it is the first plan in the comparison table where all of those are ticked. Business adds automated sales tax for up to 100 transactions a month, more storage and more collaborators. Elite adds unlimited storage, 100 collaborators and priority customer care. The plan page I read does not print the monthly-billing price in a form I could read, so check what month to month costs before choosing it.
Enquiries only: what Light is enough for
A lot of trades firms need a site that does one thing: make the phone ring or fill a quote request. Light covers that. You get four lead-capture forms with up to ten fields each, a domain for the first year, two collaborators and 2 GB of storage. For a firm with a phone-first service such as emergency call-outs, that is plenty: one form for quote requests, one for "request a call back", and one spare.
Two GB is more than it sounds if you compress images. Phone photos at 3 to 5 MB each would fill it with roughly 400 to 670 pictures (my arithmetic, not a Wix figure), and a gallery of 40 well-chosen job photos is a fraction of that. The limit that bites sooner is collaborators: two logins cover an owner and one office person, and no more.
What Light cannot do is take a booking or a deposit. Wix's help article says you can add Wix Bookings to a site for free but you must upgrade to accept bookings, and that online payments also need an upgrade. If your customers phone to arrange visits anyway, that may not matter.
A ten-field quote form that fits inside Light's limit
Light allows ten fields per form, which is enough if you choose them. The temptation with a trades enquiry is to ask for everything, but every extra field costs you completed forms. This one asks for what the first call-back needs and nothing else. It is a filled-in example for a heating and plumbing firm, with the phone number printed above the form, because someone whose boiler has failed in winter should call rather than type.
| # | Field | Type | Required | Why it is there |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Name | Text | Yes | So the call-back is personal |
| 2 | Phone | Phone | Yes | The channel that wins the job |
| 3 | No | For a written quote, if they prefer it | ||
| 4 | Address of the job | Text | Yes | Tells you whether you cover it and how long the visit will take |
| 5 | What do you need? | Dropdown: repair, service, replacement, new installation, not sure | Yes | Routes the enquiry |
| 6 | Describe the problem | Long text | Yes | Two sentences are enough to prepare |
| 7 | How urgent is it? | Dropdown: no heating or hot water, a leak, within a month, planning ahead | Yes | Sorts the queue |
| 8 | A photo | File upload | No | Saves a trip on simple jobs |
| 9 | Best time to ring | Dropdown | No | Cuts phone tag |
| 10 | How did you hear about us? | Dropdown | No | Shows which marketing works |
Light caps you at four forms per site, so spend them on purpose: this quote request, a short call-back request, a trade or supplier enquiry, and one spare. If you need to trim, drop fields 9 and 10 first. Test the photo field with a real phone photo, because I have not confirmed that every form type on every plan accepts uploads, and send the notifications to an inbox somebody checks on their phone. Fast replies matter more than clever forms, as replying to trade enquiries in 60 seconds with AI explains, and if your job software can take enquiries directly, sending website enquiries to job software covers the hand-off.
Bookings and deposits: what Core adds, and how to set it up
Wix's plan descriptions put bookings at Core and above. The Wix Bookings help article says clients can pay by card or PayPal, that online payment can be switched on or off for each service, and that a booking calendar can sync with a personal calendar. You can ask for a deposit when a customer books and take the balance in person, and reminders can go out by email or SMS. That suits a trades firm in a particular way: the booking is the visit, and the deposit stops no-shows.
The details that matter for site visits come from Wix's other help articles. A service can be set at the client's location, and an address field then appears on the booking form. Booking forms can carry custom text fields, dropdowns and file uploads, and any field can be required, though the article's example for uploads is medical files rather than photos, so test a phone photo on your own site. First name and email are always required by default, so a customer who will not give an email address cannot book online; keep the phone number beside the booking button for them. SMS reminders need a plan that supports booking features, go out 24 hours before a session, cannot be retimed or reworded, and draw on a quota that renews on the first of each month without rolling over (a separate SMS plan can add to it). They also apply only to bookings made after you switch the reminder on, so set it up before you open the diary, not after the first week of bookings. Here is a filled-in service for a heating firm, to show how the pieces fit.
Service: Boiler service
Where: client's location (address field appears on the form)
Length: 60 minutes
Deposit: $30, balance on the day
Booking form fields: boiler make and age (text, required); fuel type (dropdown, required); access notes (text); photo of the boiler and its label (file upload); best phone number (required)
Reminder: SMS 24 hours before (fixed timing)
Not bookable online: emergency call-outs (the page shows the phone number instead)Notice the last line. A burst pipe is not something a customer wants to schedule through a calendar, so keep emergency work as a phone-first route, which can be covered after hours by a receptionist service. The tutorial on an AI chatbot for plumbers that answers questions, collects photos and refuses jobs covers how to do that without a chatbot taking on work it cannot do.
Domain, email and the costs outside the plan
The plan price is not the whole bill. The domain is free for the first year through the voucher, and after that you pay to keep it; Wix's plan FAQ says the voucher is not included when you renew the plan. Wix does not show the domain's renewal price on its plan page, so look it up before you claim the voucher and compare it with what an independent registrar charges for the same name. Email is separate: a mailbox on your own domain from a provider such as Google Workspace lists at about $7 a month for the Starter edition, and a firm with two mailboxes pays about $168 a year.
There is one fee to know about if you sell maintenance plans. Wix's plan page lists a "Pricing Plans transaction fee" of 4% on Core, 2% on Business and 0% on Business Elite, with Light not included. It gives no note on what the fee covers, and Wix's help centre sets up memberships and packages through a separate Pricing Plans app, so it appears to relate to those. If you plan to sell annual service plans online, ask Wix to confirm in writing.
Finally, a lock-in. A Wix site cannot be moved to another host. If you outgrow it you rebuild, and that is a good reason to choose the plan on what the site must do rather than because the AI builder made the first draft in two minutes.
Five common trades sites, and the plan each needs
| Site | What it needs | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Emergency plumber, phone-first, a handful of pages | Tap-to-call number and one call-back form | Light |
| Electrician who wants quote requests with photos | A form with an upload field, no online booking | Light, after testing the upload |
| Boiler servicing with an online diary | Bookings, a deposit and reminders | Core |
| Three-van firm with an office person and a van lead editing | Bookings and at least three logins | Core, with five collaborators |
| Firm selling annual service plans online | Payments and the Pricing Plans fee to be confirmed | Core or Business, once Wix confirms the fee |
A sixth case, a firm with ten or more people editing the site, would push you towards Business for its ten collaborators. Most small trades firms never reach it.
A three-year sum for a three-van heating firm
Take a made-up three-van heating and plumbing firm that wants a quote form, online booking for servicing visits and a deposit. It needs two mailboxes, and three people edit the site: the owner, an office person and a van lead. Three people means Light's two collaborators are not enough, which settles the plan before the price does. Here is how the plans add up over three years, with the two mailboxes at about $7 a month each and domain renewals left out because Wix's renewal price is not shown on its plan page.
| Plan | Plan, 36 months | Two mailboxes, 36 months | Total | Fits this firm? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Light | $612 | $504 | $1,116 | No: no bookings or deposits, two collaborators |
| Core | $1,044 | $504 | $1,548 | Yes: bookings, deposits, five collaborators |
| Business | $1,404 | $504 | $1,908 | More than it needs |
| Business Elite | $5,724 | $504 | $6,228 | No |
Core costs $12 a month more than Light, or $144 a year. Does online booking earn that? Suppose it takes 20 bookings a month and saves five minutes of phone tag on each, a figure you should time for yourself. That is 100 minutes, about 1.7 hours, and at $40 an hour of owner or office time, about $67 a month against an extra $12. The saving is not guaranteed, but the margin is wide enough that Core is a safe choice for any firm that books visits.
What the AI builder gets wrong on a trades site
Wix's own Harmony page says "AI can make mistakes. Always double-check the results." On a trades site, the mistakes that matter are claims. The builder writes confident copy, and a site that says you are licensed, insured, award-winning or on call all night can cause real trouble if it is untrue. The way to stay in control is to give it the facts and forbid the rest. Here is a brief I would paste in.
Build a website for [Company], a heating and plumbing firm. Services: boiler servicing, boiler repair, radiator and pipework, leak repairs, bathroom fitting. Hours: Monday to Friday 08:00 to 17:30; emergency calls by phone only, answered [yes/no]. Phone: [number]. Do not write any claim about licences, insurance, years in business, awards, guarantees, reviews or service area; put the placeholder TO CHECK where one would go. Pages: Home, Services, About, Contact, Book a visit. Tone: plain and practical.Then audit what comes back. The table is an illustrative list of claims a builder commonly writes, and what to check before publishing.
| What the draft says | What to check | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| "Fully licensed and insured" | Your licence numbers and insurance certificate | Keep it only with the numbers or certificate to hand |
| "Over 20 years of experience" | The year you started trading | Replace with the real figure |
| "24/7 emergency service" | Who actually answers at 2 a.m. | Say "emergency line" only if somebody does |
| "Serving the whole region" | Where your vans really go | List your own service range |
| Customer testimonials | None are yours | Delete; add real reviews with permission |
| Polished photos of finished work | Stock images, not your jobs | Replace with your own, compressed |
| "Free quotes" | Whether the estimate really is free | Confirm, and say what is free |
The same discipline applies to Wix's own chat tool. Wix Smart Chat replaces the older chat product and draws on AI credits, so decide what it may answer before you switch it on. For a worked review of an AI-built trades site, a plumber's site built and checked with Wix's AI builder shows a full draft going through this kind of audit, and the cost side of hiring someone instead is in what an AI website builder or a web designer each really costs.
What a small trades firm can skip
- Business Elite. Unlimited storage, 100 collaborators and priority care suit a large firm, not three vans.
- Automated sales tax, which Wix lists from Business at up to 100 transactions a month. It matters for a shop that ships goods, not for a service firm invoicing jobs.
- Dropshipping, a product catalogue and loyalty or referral programmes. They sit in the store-oriented rows of the plan table and add nothing to a service site.
- Customer accounts, unless you want customers to log in and see past bookings.
- A second assistant tool or the AI phone agent in the first month. Get the form, the booking page and the phone number right, then see whether you still need more.
- Memberships through Pricing Plans, unless you are selling service plans online and have checked the fee.
Ten minutes at checkout: what to confirm before paying
- The price and currency on the checkout page, and whether tax is included. The plan page says displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase, so Light's $17 a month is a $204 payment on day one.
- The billing period. Yearly billing is the headline figure. Wix says other subscription periods are available, at prices that appear at checkout, so compare them before you commit a year of cash.
- The renewal date and renewal price. The plan page notes that its displayed offer applies only to the initial term of a yearly or multi-year subscription, and it prints no renewal price, so find out what year two costs. Put the renewal date in your calendar a month ahead.
- The domain voucher. Claim it, then look at the domain's renewal price and who is listed as owner.
- Who gets a login. Count the people who will edit the site against the plan's collaborator limit.
- The refund terms. The plan page advertises a 14-day money-back guarantee on the first upgrade to a Premium plan. Read the full terms at checkout before you pay, including what happens to a domain claimed with the voucher if you cancel inside those 14 days.
A short test closes the decision. Build the site on the free plan, create your services and forms, and run a test booking in preview. Upgrade only when the site does what you need and you can name the one feature that Light lacks. If that is bookings or deposits, Core is the plan. If nothing is missing, stay on Light and spend the $144 a year difference on something that wins jobs.
Questions trades owners ask before choosing a Wix plan
Is the Wix AI website builder free?
Starting is free: Wix says you can start building with AI with no credit card, and its AI builder is part of Wix Harmony, its hybrid editor. The free plan keeps Wix branding and a Wix web address. You need a Premium plan to connect a custom domain, and upgrading includes a voucher for a free domain for one year, which is not repeated when you renew.
Do AI credits run out on a paid plan?
They can. Wix's support article lists estimated monthly actions for its AI tools of up to 150 on Light, 200 on Core, 300 on Business and 1,000 on Business Elite, renewing monthly with no roll-over and no top-ups on Premium plans. Chatting with Aria, Wix's AI agent, is free and uses no credits. Check the limits if you plan to lean on Smart Chat or the AI phone agent.
Can I move a Wix site to another host later?
Not as a finished site. Wix sites cannot be moved to another host, so switching means rebuilding elsewhere. You can keep a domain you own and point it at a new site, but check Wix's transfer terms for any domain claimed with the free voucher before relying on it. That is a reason to pick the plan and the domain deliberately now.
Does Wix take a cut of booking deposits?
The plan page lists a Pricing Plans transaction fee of 4% on Core and 2% on Business, with no note on what it covers. Wix's help centre sets memberships and packages up through the separate Pricing Plans app, so the fee appears to concern those, not one-off booking deposits. Card processing fees depend on the provider you set up. Ask Wix support to confirm before taking deposits at volume.
Further reads
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Wix plans page and its FAQ (read 29 October 2026; regional versions add local tax), Wix support articles on AI credits, Wix Bookings, getting paid online, booking forms and SMS reminders, and the Wix AI website builder and Harmony pages; Google Workspace list price from the series fact sheet.