How much does a website cost for a small business in Canada?

Four realistic paths, in very different price bands. DIY on a builder like Squarespace or Wix runs about $20 to $70 CAD a month on Canadian plans (Squarespace and Wix published pricing, June 2026), with you doing all of the work. A freelancer build typically lands between $1,500 and $4,000 CAD upfront for a small business site, and once it ships, maintaining it is your problem. Agencies start around $6,000 CAD, and the number climbs past $15,000 once strategy, copywriting, and custom design enter the scope.

The fourth path is newer: done-for-you subscriptions, where one monthly fee covers the build, hosting, and ongoing updates. Monthly pricing across these services generally falls between roughly $100 and $500 CAD depending on what is bundled. That is the lane we work in, and we have put our own number at the bottom of this page rather than dressing it up as neutral market data.

None of these bands is wrong. Each one trades money for time in a different ratio, and the right one depends on how much of each you actually have.

Usually one of the three big cost multipliers: page count, custom design, and ecommerce, because the cheap quote assumes the minimum of each. A five-page brochure site and a thirty-page site with online checkout are different projects, even when the quote calls both of them a website. Every extra service page, location page, or product adds writing, design, and testing time someone has to pay for.

The quieter cost drivers are the ones owners forget to budget for: copywriting, because someone has to write every page; photography, because stock photos make a real business look like a stock photo; and revisions, because two rounds are usually included and the fifth round is usually billed.

If a quote looks suspiciously low, one of those three is missing from it. Ask which one before you sign, not after.

Monthly numbers hide the real comparison. Run everything over three years. A $40 CAD a month builder is $1,440 over three years, plus every evening you spend in the page editor. A $2,500 freelancer build plus $25 a month hosting comes to about $3,400, assuming nothing breaks and you never need changes. A $10,000 agency build with a paid care plan can pass $14,000 in the same window.

Maintenance is the line most pricing guides skip. WebFX's website maintenance pricing guide (2026) puts routine small-business maintenance at roughly $1,100 to $5,000 a year in US dollars: software updates, security patches, backups, and small content fixes. Whoever you hire, ask who does that work and what it costs, because the honest answer is never that nobody does it and it costs nothing.

Then add the boring recurring costs that apply to every path: a domain at roughly $15 to $25 CAD a year at typical registrar list prices, and standalone hosting at $10 to $50 CAD a month when it is not bundled into something else.

Free tiers are real, but they are not a free web presence. On a free plan you typically get the builder's branding on your pages and an address like yourbusiness on the builder's own domain instead of your own, and removing either one requires the paid plan anyway. Customers notice both.

The bigger cost is time. Every hour spent fighting a template is an hour not spent on paying work, and the finished page still competes against businesses whose sites were built by someone who does it daily.

Free is fine for testing whether you want a website at all. It is a poor place to send a referral who is deciding whether you are a real business.

Ownership first. The domain should be registered in your name, in a registrar account you can log into, no matter who builds or hosts the site. This is the most common trap in small-business web work, and it is the difference between switching providers and starting over from nothing. We wrote a full guide on it: who actually owns your website.

Then check the exit. Ask what you keep if you leave and what leaving costs. A fair answer is your domain, your content, and no fee. Anything else is a leash dressed up as a service.

Finally, get the all-in number in writing: build, hosting, domain, maintenance, and the cost of small edits after launch. The quote that looks expensive up front is quite often the cheap one over three years. And before comparing quotes at all, it helps to see what a finished build includes, page by page; ours are public, screenshots included.

Done-for-you only makes sense when your time is worth more on the job than in a page editor. If someone you trust already maintains your site well and the domain is in your name, you are covered. And if you actually enjoy building your own site and have the evenings to spend, a DIY builder at $20 to $70 CAD a month is honest value, and you should not pay a service like ours on top of it.