How much does a website cost in Canada? For a small business, a professional custom build usually lands between $8,000 and $18,000, with simpler template sites coming in under $1,000 plus a lot of your own time and complex builds running well past $20,000. Three things move a project inside that range: how many pages you need, whether anyone else writes the words, and what the site has to do beyond showing information. Below are the bands, what sits inside each one, and the decisions that shift a quote by a factor of five.
How much does a website cost in Canada? The short answer
All figures are Canadian dollars, reviewed October 2026, and we revisit them periodically because they move. These are our own bands, drawn from the work we quote and deliver, not an industry average.
| Route | Price | Suits | Pages | Why it costs that |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-built on a template platform | Under $1,000, plus forty to eighty hours of your own time | Testing an idea, or a very simple offer | 1 to 5 | You're paying a subscription and doing the labour yourself |
| Professional small business site | $8,000 to $18,000 | An established business that needs to be taken seriously | 5 to 12 | Custom design, real structure, and somebody accountable for it |
| Larger or more complex build | $18,000 to $45,000 | More pages, custom functionality, integrations or an online store | 12 to 40 | Each new function is its own small project |
| Enterprise or heavily custom | $60,000 and up | Large organisations, bespoke applications | Varies | Out of scope here, included so you can see where the scale ends |
Those bands are ours , so here's an independent check on them. The Business Development Bank of Canada reports that for most of its clients, web development costs typically range from $10,000 to $30,000 for the initial build, with outliers reaching $60,000 to $100,000. A national bank's own client data landing in roughly the same place as a Vancouver studio's quotes is about as much corroboration as this topic offers.
One redirect before we go on. If you're pricing a rebuild of a site you already have rather than a first build, this isn't your article: read what a website redesign costs and our small business redesign cost guide instead, because the arithmetic is genuinely different. If you aren't sure which you need, does a redesign make sense settles it.
What actually drives the price of a website
Nine decisions account for nearly all the variation in web design pricing. Each one pushes a quote in a predictable direction.
- Page count. The first page is expensive because it establishes the design system. By the fifth, you're filling in a pattern that already exists, and it costs roughly a fifth of what the first one did .
- Custom design or a configured template. The single biggest swing on the list. A configured template can look perfectly good; it just can't look like only you.
- Who writes the words. The line clients underestimate nine times out of ten . Good copy takes as long as the design does. Website copy that ranks and converts explains why.
- Whether usable photography exists. Stock is cheap and looks it. A half-day shoot is not a large cost next to the build, and it changes the whole page.
- Functionality beyond pages. Booking, payments, logins, calculators, listings, portals. Each one is a small project with its own testing.
- Integrations. Anything that has to talk to a system you already run adds cost in proportion to how badly that system is documented.
- Ecommerce. Product count changes the shape of the project, not just its size. Ecommerce website design covers that properly.
- Multiple languages. Roughly another half of the content cost per language, plus ongoing upkeep.
- How fast you can decide. The cheapest client to work with is a decisive one. Delay costs real money on a fixed-fee project and it costs you more on an hourly one.
Two things that look like price drivers but belong elsewhere. Timelines are set by decision speed more than budget, and how long a website build takes covers them. Platform choice barely moves the build cost, and the Webflow, Squarespace and Wix comparison is where that decision lives.
What is included at that price, and what is not
Most quote confusion isn't about the number. It's about what the number covers. Here's the split a professional small business build normally follows.
| Normally included | Normally quoted separately |
|---|---|
| Discovery and a sitemap | Copywriting |
| Design of every page type | Photography and video |
| The build itself | Logo and brand identity |
| Responsive behaviour on phones and tablets | Hosting and platform fees |
| Basic on-page search setup | Ongoing maintenance |
| A working contact route and analytics | Migrating a large volume of old content |
| Launch, plus a short window for fixes | Paid advertising, and anything with a monthly licence |
Two of those exclusions have real numbers attached elsewhere. Brand identity is its own piece of work, priced in what a logo costs in Canada and delivered through our brand design service. Ongoing maintenance is a separate subject with its own article coming, so all we'll say here is that it's a recurring cost and it belongs in your first-year number rather than in a surprise invoice. For what a good build actually delivers, what makes a great small business website is the checklist version, and responsive behaviour is covered in mobile-first web design.
The costs people forget
Budgets don't break during the build. They break two months after launch, when the recurring items start arriving.
The domain, which is small but annual. Hosting or a platform subscription: BDC puts typical hosting at $20 to $60 a month depending on traffic, which matches what we see. Business email. Any app or plugin carrying a monthly fee, and these accumulate quietly. Stock or commissioned photography. A paid font licence, which catches people out because the font that made the design work often isn't free to use commercially. Accessibility remediation, if it wasn't scoped in. And the one nobody counts: the staff hours spent reviewing, approving and gathering content, which on a twelve-page site is not trivial.
The useful point is this. The recurring total is small next to the build, usually a low four-figure sum a year for a small business site, but it's permanent. So it belongs in the first conversation rather than on an invoice in March.
Is it cheaper to build a website yourself?
In money, yes, obviously. In total cost, it depends entirely on what your own time is worth and whether the site has to carry sales.
| Route | What it costs | What it genuinely suits | The real risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Template, built yourself | Under $1,000 plus your weeks | Testing an idea, a simple offer, a side business | Your time, and a ceiling you'll hit later |
| Freelancer | Often half a studio fee | A clear brief and a defined scope | Capacity and continuity if they move on |
| Studio | The bands above | A site the business depends on for enquiries | Paying for strategy you didn't need |
Be fair to the cheap options, because they're often right. A business testing whether anyone wants the thing should not spend $15,000 finding out. A good freelancer can be excellent value and some are better than some studios. What the studio fee buys is strategy before design, copy that was written rather than assembled, accountability when something breaks, and somebody to call in eighteen months who remembers how the site was built.
And the argument for having a real site at all isn't ours. CIRA's Canada's Internet Factbook found 30 per cent of Canadians say they don't trust a business or organisation that doesn't have a website. That's a third of your market gone before you've quoted anything.
“should be considered an investment to help generate revenue and growth”
Business Development Bank of Canada, on how to treat a website budget, bdc.ca
If you're weighing suppliers rather than routes, how to choose a web designer and what to expect when hiring a studio are the right reading. On platforms, Webflow against WordPress, Shopify and Squarespace covers it, and our Webflow work shows what a managed platform looks like in practice.
Why two quotes for the same brief can differ by five times
Because they're quoting different projects. Seven reasons, in rough order of how much they move the number: a different reading of scope; custom design against a configured template; copy and photography included or not; discovery and strategy included or not; a solo junior builder against a team with a reviewer; offshore rates against local ones; and two rounds of revisions assumed against unlimited.
So don't compare the totals. Compare what's inside them, and ask every quoting party the same three questions.
- What exactly is in scope? Ask for the page list, the number of unique page designs, and a yes or no on copy and photography. About one quote in three we're asked to review has no written scope at all .
- How many rounds of revisions, and what happens after? An unlimited-revisions promise is either priced in already or it isn't real.
- Who owns the finished site and the domain? If the answer isn't you, the price is irrelevant.
None of that is briefing advice, which is a craft of its own: how to brief a web designer covers it, and the shape of site you're buying is settled in lead generation versus brochure websites.
What a realistic budget looks like for a BC small business
Three worked scenarios, all built from the bands above rather than new numbers, and all first-hand figures for Sam to confirm .
A single-location service business in Burnaby or Surrey. Eight pages, custom design, copy written for them, no shoot. About $11,000 for the build and copy, plus roughly $3,000 of first-year running costs and photography. Call it $14,000 for year one. Web design in Burnaby and Surrey is where most of these start.
A small clinic or studio with booking. Ten pages plus a booking integration. About $17,000 for the build, $2,000 for copy and a half-day shoot, and $2,000 in the first year for the platform and the booking tool. About $21,000.
A small online store, forty products. About $22,000 for the build, with product photography and listing copy adding real cost and the first year of platform and transaction fees on top. About $27,000, and the photography is the line that surprises people.
If those numbers are above where you need to be, that's a scope conversation rather than a dead end, and affordable web design in Vancouver is where it starts. Our case studies show what the bands actually produced.
Red flags in a web design quote
- No written scope, just a total
- No named deliverables, so nothing to hold anyone to
- A price with no revision limit stated anywhere
- No mention of who owns the finished site and the domain. This is the big one, and it deserves two sentences: find out before you pay whether the domain will be registered to you and whether you can take the site elsewhere. Plenty of cheap arrangements quietly answer no to both.
- Hosting or platform costs not disclosed
- Pressure to sign inside a day
- A monthly figure with no end date and no ownership at the end of it
- A guaranteed search ranking, which nobody can promise
Frequently Asked Questions
How much should I pay to have a website built?
For a small business in Canada, $8,000 to $18,000 buys a professional custom site of five to twelve pages. Below about $5,000 you're buying a configured template, which can be the right call. Above $20,000 you're paying for custom functionality, integrations or an online store rather than for better design.
What is the cheapest way to own a website?
Register your own domain, pick a template platform, and build it yourself over a few weekends. Budget under $1,000 for the first year and forty to eighty hours of your time. Keep the domain in your own account whatever else you do, because that's the part that's genuinely yours.
Can I run a website free of cost?
Only on a subdomain of somebody else's platform, usually with their branding on it, and you won't own the address. For a business that's false economy, since the domain is the cheapest part of the whole exercise and the thing you least want to rent.
Is there a monthly fee for having a website?
Yes, always something. Hosting or a platform subscription typically runs $20 to $60 a month according to BDC, plus the annual domain, business email, and any apps with their own fees. A small business site usually totals a low four-figure sum a year before any maintenance.
What is a fair hourly rate for a web designer in Canada?
Experienced Canadian designers and studios generally sit between $90 and $175 an hour, with freelancers lower and specialist development higher. Most small business work is quoted as a fixed fee rather than hourly, which is usually better for you because it puts the estimating risk on the studio.
So: under $1,000 and your weeks for a template, $8,000 to $18,000 for a professional small business build, $18,000 to $45,000 once the site has to do real work. Page count, who writes the copy, and what the site does beyond showing information are what move you between those. And whatever you pay, make sure the answer to who owns the domain is you.
Parabolic Studio builds websites for small businesses across Metro Vancouver, and we quote with the scope written down so you can see exactly what the number covers.
Figures in Canadian dollars, last reviewed October 2026.
