Business4 min read
How much does a website cost in Canada?
The honest answer is a range, and the range is wide. Here is where the width comes from, and our own numbers so you have something concrete to compare against.
Every studio is asked this before anything else, and most answer it badly, either with a number so vague it means nothing or with a refusal to say anything until a discovery call. We would rather tell you what we charge and why, so that you can compare it with what anyone else tells you.
Our starting points
These are the figures on our pricing page, in Canadian dollars, as of September 2026. They are starting points, not packages: each engagement is scoped around your business and priced accordingly.
- A Digital Edition, one of our finished one-of-one designs retired and adapted to your brand: $2,400, launched in two to three weeks.
- Brand and website foundations, an identity and a website built as one system: from $4,000, five to seven weeks.
- Growth websites, strategy-led sites with a real content architecture for businesses whose site is a sales channel: from $7,500, seven to ten weeks.
- Signature digital experiences, fully art-directed flagship sites with custom interaction and motion: from $12,000, ten to fourteen weeks.
- Digital products and platforms, web applications and portals scoped as products: custom, from twelve weeks.
Ongoing hosting and care are priced separately, from $95 a month, so that the build invoice is the build and nothing else. That separation also matters for how the costs are treated at tax time, which we cover in our guide to writing off a website in Canada.
What moves the price
Two websites that look similar on the surface can differ by a factor of three in cost. The difference is almost never the number of pages. It is the amount of thinking, making, and engineering that each page requires.
- Strategy and content. A site that needs positioning, messaging, and a content structure worked out from scratch costs more than one where the business already knows what it wants to say and has the words and photographs ready.
- Design originality. Adapting an existing design is cheaper than designing from a blank page, which is the whole reason our Editions exist. Custom art direction, illustration, and motion sit at the top of the range.
- Functionality. Booking, ecommerce, customer portals, integrations with your other systems, and anything with a login are engineering work, priced as such.
- Photography. Real photography of real work is often the highest-return line on the whole project, and it is a separate cost. We say so up front rather than hiding it inside the design fee.
- Speed. A compressed timeline that means working around other commitments costs more. A relaxed one does not cost less, because the work is the same.
What should be included
When comparing quotes, the number matters less than what it buys. A site that is fast, accessible, findable, and maintainable is the minimum we consider professional; a site that is not is not cheaper, it is unfinished. At any price, a quote should include the following, or say plainly that it does not.
- Responsive design tested on real phones, not just a narrowed browser window.
- Performance work: fast loads on mobile on a real connection, images sized and compressed properly.
- Accessibility basics: semantic structure, keyboard paths, contrast, alt text.
- Search foundations: clean metadata, a sitemap, structured data, sensible headings.
- Analytics, configured so you can see whether the site is working.
- Training or documentation, so your team can make ordinary updates without paying for them.
- A stated period of post-launch support.
The cheapest site is often the most expensive
A low quote usually means one of three things: a template with your logo on it, a designer learning on your project, or a scope that leaves out the items above and charges for them later. None of these is always wrong, and for a business testing an idea the first can be exactly right. But the cost of a site is what it costs over its life, including the customers it fails to convert and the rebuild when it runs out of road. We wrote about that in the hidden cost of template-based design.
Questions to ask any studio
- What is included in this number, and what is not?
- Who will actually do the work, and will I talk to them directly?
- What happens after launch, and what does it cost?
- Will I own the site, the domain, and the content outright?
- Can you show me sites you built that are live today, and can I click through to them?
- What will you tell me no to, and why?
Questions people ask
- How much does a small business website cost in Ontario?
- From our own price list: $2,400 for a customised Digital Edition, from $4,000 for brand and website foundations, from $7,500 for a strategy-led growth site, and from $12,000 for a fully art-directed flagship. Other studios will differ; what matters is what each number includes.
- Why do quotes vary so much?
- Because the work varies. Strategy, original design, custom functionality, photography, and timeline each move the price, and a quote that leaves some of them out will look cheaper until they are added later.
- Is there a cheaper way to get a custom-quality site?
- Our Digital Editions exist for exactly this: a finished, original design sold once, then adapted to your brand at a fixed price. You skip the design phase without skipping the design.
Put it to work