A small business website in Canada costs anywhere from about $20 a month if you build it yourself to five figures if you hire a full agency, and most small businesses land somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000 CAD for a site built by someone else.
That range is uselessly wide, and I know it. The reason it's that wide is not that some people are being ripped off and others are getting a deal. It's that the word "website" covers a four-page brochure site and a store that takes payments, manages inventory, and handles user accounts, and those are not the same job any more than a shed and a house are the same build.
So this post does two things. It gives you real numbers, including mine, which are published on our packages page rather than hidden behind a call. And it gives you the questions I ask before I quote anyone, so that when you get a number from someone else you can tell whether it's high, low, or just answering a different question than the one you asked.
I run a two-person web studio in Hamilton, Ontario. Everything below is either our own pricing or sourced from published 2026 Canadian market data, and I've said which is which.
The short answer, in one table
| Approach | Upfront | Annual ongoing | Your hours | 3-year total | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY builder | $0 | $240 to $600 | 20 to 30 to build, then a few a month | $720 to $1,800 in cash | Validating an idea, or you enjoy building |
| One-page, built for you | From $1,499 | $1,788 (care plan) | 2 to 3 | $6,714 | Simple site, you don't want to build it |
| 5 to 8 page site, built for you | From $4,199 | $1,788 (care plan) | 4 to 6 | $9,414 | Established business, real web presence |
| Custom build (e-commerce, accounts, integrations) | Scoped individually | $1,788 and up | Varies | Varies | The site is the business |
| Larger agency | BDC puts larger builds at $10,000 to $30,000 | Commonly 15% to 25% of build | Low | Varies | Bigger budgets, brand and strategy work |
Three notes on reading that table. Our own prices are before tax, so add whatever applies where you are; in Ontario that's 13% HST, and there's more on it below. The annual ongoing figure for our tiers is our care plan at $149 a month, which includes managed hosting, so it isn't additional to hosting, it replaces it. And the DIY row's cash total genuinely is the cheapest number in the table. That's not a setup for a twist. It's true, and the next section is about what that number leaves out and what it doesn't.
What a website actually costs over three years
Almost every cost guide quotes you an upfront price. Almost none of them tell you what the thing costs to own, which is the number you actually live with.
Building it yourself
An AI website builder or template platform runs roughly $20 to $50 a month depending on platform and tier. Call it $240 to $600 a year, and it keeps running for as long as the site is up, so $720 to $1,800 over three years. Add a domain at $15 to $25 a year, and add whatever you spend on stock photography or an icon pack.
Then there are the hours. For someone doing it for the first time who actually cares about the result, a small business site is realistically 20 to 30 hours once you count writing the copy, wrangling the photos, and the evening you lose to figuring out why the mobile layout broke. After launch, budget an hour or two a month for updates, changes, and the occasional thing that stops working.
If your time is worth $50 to $75 an hour, and if you're running a business it is, that initial build is $1,000 to $2,250 of you, spent on something that isn't your job. Over three years with maintenance, call it $3,000 to $4,500 in time on top of the cash. All in, somewhere between $3,700 and $6,300 depending on how you value an hour.
Hiring us
Our one-page package starts at $1,499 with the first month of care included, then $149 a month after that. Over three years that's $1,499 plus 35 months of care, which comes to $6,714. Your own time investment is a couple of hours: answering questions, sending photos, approving the thing.
Our five to eight page package starts at $4,199 on the same basis, which comes to $9,414 over three years. Both figures are before tax.
Anything involving payments, user accounts, or integrations gets scoped and quoted individually, because a brochure site and a membership platform are not the same job and shouldn't cost the same. I'd rather tell you that than put a fake number on this page.
The honest comparison
In cash out of pocket, DIY wins over three years, and it isn't close. Anyone telling you that hiring someone saves you money on a simple brochure site is selling you something.
Once you price your own hours, the difference shrinks to roughly $2,000 to $3,000 over three years against our one-page package. It doesn't disappear, and I'm not going to pretend it does. What's worth doing instead is naming exactly what that money buys, because "you're paying for quality" is what people say when they can't itemise it.
Twenty-five hours of your life. That's the difference between two or three hours of answering questions and twenty to thirty hours of building, plus the ongoing hour a month that becomes your problem forever. If those hours are worth more spent on your business, you've already got your answer.
Judgment you can't buy from a template. An AI builder hands you a functioning site. It doesn't decide what your homepage should say in the first six words, which photo leads, what belongs above the fold, or which typeface suits a business like yours. Those are the differences between a site that exists and a site that makes a stranger think these people are serious, and none of them are technical.
The setup nobody tells you about. Google Business Profile, analytics, heading structure a search engine can read, a sitemap, a site that a screen reader can navigate. Most DIY sites skip all of it, not through carelessness but because nobody mentions it.
Someone to call. When it breaks at 9pm on a Saturday, either that's your problem or it's ours.
That's the trade. About $2,500 over three years, against twenty-five hours and a finish you'd otherwise have to produce yourself. For some people that's obviously worth it and for others it obviously isn't, and I'd rather you work that out honestly than be talked into it.
If you enjoy building things, or you're testing an idea you might scrap in three months, build it yourself. I mean that, and I've written a whole post on which builder to pick.
Why two quotes for "the same" website can differ by thousands
Here's a real one, anonymized.
Someone came to me having shopped around for quotes on a website. Before giving them a number I did what I always do, which is ask what the site needs to be: what kind of business, how many pages, what it needs to actually do, which features are essential and which are nice to have. Once I had the full scope I quoted $1,500.
Partway through, the scope grew. Features came up that weren't in the original conversation, and they were real work rather than tweaks. So I re-quoted at $1,800 rather than absorbing it quietly or pretending it was always included. That's the honest version of fixed-price work: the price is fixed against a scope, and when the scope moves you get told before the work happens, not after.
(For the record, that project was priced under our earlier rates, and the same job today would be scoped as a custom build and priced accordingly. I'm including it because the process is the point, not the number.)
The reason it's worth telling: they'd been quoted up to $5,000 elsewhere for what they understood to be the same website. They were thrilled with what they paid. I was paid properly for my time. Neither of those had to come at the other's expense.
Now the part I want to be careful about, because it would be easy and dishonest to turn this into a story about agencies overcharging.
I never saw the $5,000 quote. It may well have included market research, custom copywriting, original photography, or brand work, all of which are real line items that take real hours. From what that client described to me, I couldn't see why their site needed any of it. But "I couldn't see why" is not the same as "they were being ripped off," and a quote that includes three things you don't need isn't dishonest. It's answering a different question.
Published 2026 Canadian guides cluster tightly around $2,000 to $10,000 (opens in a new tab) for a professional small business build, and pricing data compiled across Canadian agencies by Clutch.co puts a basic five-to-seven-page site at $2,500 to $5,500 (opens in a new tab). That $5,000 quote was ordinary market rate. Not high. Ordinary.
I want to be exact about where we sit in that, because it would be easy to fudge. We are not at the low end of the published range. We are below it: our one-page package starts under the floor of most Canadian guides I can find, and our five to eight page package sits inside the Clutch band rather than above it. You can go cheaper than us, and some Canadian shops openly do, starting a few hundred dollars lower for a small page count. I'd just want to know what's different about the job before assuming the cheaper number is the same product. That isn't a boast about value, it's a description of overheads. We're two people with no account managers, no outsourcing, and almost nothing to cover but our own time. A ten-person agency quoting $8,000 for the same page count isn't gouging you; it's paying salaries we don't have.
The useful lesson isn't that cheap is good. It's that you cannot compare two website quotes until you know what's in each of them, and most quotes don't tell you.
The questions I ask before I give anyone a number
This is the part I'd want if I were you. When someone asks what a website costs and the honest answer is "it depends," these are what it depends on. Answer these before you talk to anyone, and every quote you get afterwards will be comparable.
- What is the site for? Getting found, getting enquiries, selling directly, serving existing customers?
- How many pages, roughly? A one-pager, five, fifteen?
- Does it need to do anything, or only say something? Payments, bookings, logins, gated content, inventory?
- Does it need to connect to anything you already use? Booking software, CRM, accounting, inventory system?
- Who is writing the words? You, them, or nobody yet?
- Do you have photography, or does that need to happen?
- Do you have a logo and brand colours, or is that part of the job?
- Are there accessibility or compliance requirements? Common in health, legal, and public-facing services.
- What happens after launch? Who hosts it, who updates it, who do you call when it breaks?
- What's your actual timeline, and is it driven by something real?
Every one of those moves the number. Questions 3, 4 and 5 move it the most, and question 9 is the one people forget until the bill arrives.
If someone quotes you before asking most of these, they're either using a fixed package, which is fine as long as they tell you exactly what's in it, or they're guessing.
What drives the price up
Concrete line items, with rough Canadian ranges for 2026.
- Extra pages. Each page needs design, content, mobile testing and SEO setup. Roughly $400 to $600 per additional page.
- Copywriting. If you're not writing it, someone is. Adds meaningfully, and it's the single most common thing people don't budget for.
- Photography. Original photography versus stock is a real gap. Stock is fine for some businesses and obviously wrong for others.
- E-commerce. Product catalogue, cart, checkout, payment processing, inventory. Canadian e-commerce builds on WooCommerce or Shopify start near $5,000 and regularly exceed $20,000 (opens in a new tab) for multi-product catalogues with payment gateway integration.
- Bookings and scheduling, especially with deposits or calendar sync.
- User accounts and gated content. Once people log in, you've moved from a website to an application.
- Integrations with software you already run.
- Accessibility compliance, which in Ontario is not optional for many businesses.
Ongoing costs people forget
The build is the number people compare. This is the number that surprises them.
- Hosting. $10 to $50 a month standalone, or included in a care plan. BDC puts typical hosting at $20 to $60 a month (opens in a new tab) depending on traffic.
- Domain renewal. $15 to $25 a year. A .ca costs about the same as a .com and is worth having if you serve Canadian customers.
- SSL certificate, usually free now via your host, but confirm it's included rather than a line item.
- Platform subscriptions and plugin licences, which stack up quietly on WordPress in particular.
- Content updates. Either your hours or someone's fee.
- Maintenance and security updates. Larger agencies commonly price ongoing maintenance at 15% to 25% of the original build cost annually. On a $10,000 site, that's $1,500 to $2,500 a year. One Canadian guide puts the all-in post-launch budget at $75 to $300 a month (opens in a new tab) covering hosting, certificates, plugin licences and updates.
Ours is $149 a month for managed hosting, daily backups, security updates, uptime monitoring, and an hour of content edits. First month included with every build.
One thing to be clear about, because it's a genuine cost but it isn't a website cost: ongoing SEO and content marketing is separate work. We price it separately, starting at $499 a month with a three-month minimum, because search results compound over months rather than switching on. If you're comparing website quotes, keep marketing spend out of the comparison or you'll be comparing different things.
The two Canadian costs no American guide mentions
Almost every cost guide that ranks for this question is written for a US audience. Two things it will never tell you, both of which land on your invoice.
Tax. Add 13% HST in Ontario. On our $4,199 build that's $545.87. If your business is HST-registered you claim it back as an input tax credit, so it's a cash flow item rather than a real cost. If you're not registered, it's real money and it belongs in your budget.
The exchange rate you never see quoted. Platform licences, premium themes, and offshore development contracts are billed in US dollars. One Canadian agency's 2026 analysis puts that hidden markup at 23% to 41% on the sticker price (opens in a new tab) before a line of code is written. You won't find it itemised anywhere, because it isn't a line item; it's baked into what your developer paid for the tools before quoting you. It's also a fair question to ask: if a quote leans heavily on paid themes and plugins, ask what those renew at and in which currency.
Neither of these makes a Canadian build a bad deal. They just mean a US price guide is describing a different invoice than the one you'll receive.
What should you actually spend? Four situations
You're brand new and testing whether this works. Build it yourself. $20 a month, a weekend, and don't spend project money on a business you might pivot out of in six months.
You're an established local business and your site is embarrassing or nonexistent. This is the largest group and the one that most often overspends. You need a handful of pages that load fast, say the right thing, and turn up when someone searches for your service in your city. That's the $1,499 to $4,199 bracket, not the $10,000 one.
You need the site to do something. Payments, bookings, accounts, inventory. Get it scoped properly and expect a real number. This is also the one place where going cheap reliably costs more, because a half-built system that handles money is worse than no system. Our services page covers what that work involves.
You already have a site and you're wondering whether to redo it. Ask what's actually wrong. If it looks dated but works, a redesign costs less than a rebuild. If it can't do what you now need, adding to it is often cheaper than starting over. We've added subscriptions and custom content management to existing WordPress sites without a rebuild. Get someone to tell you which of the three you need before you pay for the most expensive one, which is the same judgment call behind using an AI builder versus hiring a developer.
How to read a website quote
Forget whether the number is high or low. Look at what's missing from it.
- No written scope. If the quote doesn't list what you're getting, the price means nothing.
- No page count or revision limit. Both are where "fixed price" quietly becomes hourly.
- No answer on who owns the domain, the code, and the content. If they hold the domain, you don't control your own business. Ask directly.
- No statement about hosting. Where does it live, what does that cost, can you move it?
- A proprietary platform you can't leave. If they've built on a system they own, your site is not portable and you're a tenant.
- Nothing about what happens after launch. Who fixes it, how fast, at what rate?
- No process for scope changes. Ask what happens if the project grows. A good answer is that you get told and re-quoted before the work happens. A bad answer is silence, because that means either they absorb it and resent it or they invoice you a surprise.
- A number given before they asked what the site needs to do. Covered above. It's a guess with a decimal point.
A quote that's low and specific is fine. A quote that's high and specific is fine, and it might be exactly right for you. A quote that's vague at any price is the problem.
Want a real number for your situation?
Tell us what you're trying to build and we'll scope it on a free 15-minute call, then put a fixed price in writing before anything starts. Our full pricing is on the packages page, because you shouldn't have to book a call to find out what a website costs.
Get in touch and we'll take it from there.
