I started the 35milimetre website in October 2014. That was the year I left my corporate job and started freelancing. So the site and the studio are the same age: 12 years.
For all those years, the site lived on Squarespace. At the time, the choice made sense. It was easy to use and easy to manage, and I wanted to spend my hours on client work, not on a website.
The problem with standing still
Technology moved on; Squarespace mostly didn't. The templates started to feel dated, but the price stayed at the level of high-end platforms. Then it went up.
About two years ago, I looked at Webflow seriously for the first time. The features were impressive. The catch was the learning curve: Webflow asks for more technical knowledge than I had time to build. I also asked a few designers what it would cost to move my content. By then I had close to 200 blog posts. The quotes were a serious investment, and for a freelancer, that is a lot of money for a move that doesn't bring in new work. So I stayed. Same rate, more or less the same design.
The email that changed my mind
A week ago, Squarespace sent a renewal reminder. My subscription would renew at their new rate: higher, again. That was enough to make me look at Webflow one more time.
Webflow was still as powerful and as complex as I remembered. But one thing was new for me: Webflow has an MCP connection. MCP is a standard way to let an AI assistant like Claude work directly with an app. Squarespace doesn't offer this.
In practice, it means I can connect Claude to my Webflow site and build the design with it. Even better, Claude can open my old blog on Squarespace page by page and move each post to the new site. The job I was quoted a large sum for became something I could do myself.
One weekend, back and forth
I started on a Friday evening. All weekend, Claude and I worked back and forth on the move. I stayed on Webflow's free plan the whole time, so I could see whether the blog porting actually worked before I paid anything.
By Monday, it was ready. I activated the Webflow subscription, which costs about the same as Squarespace's new rate. Everything worked with the new design.
Claude handled the backend work: moving the content, plus the SEO setup and the adjustments that help AI search tools find and read the site. In less than a week, the new 35milimetre website was ready to launch. I still find that hard to believe.
What I take from it
AI didn't just save me money. It gave me the option to leave a vendor I had stopped choosing and had only been tolerating. New platform, new design, and my 12 years of posts came with me.
There are two lessons here. First, when you don't follow the trends, it's easy to get lost; two years ago, this move was out of reach for me, and today it took a weekend. Second, for companies: Squarespace stayed mostly the same and kept raising its prices. In my opinion, that is a death sentence for a platform. When the cost to leave drops this low, loyalty has to be earned again every year.