Most owners get quoted somewhere between $3,000 and $15,000 by agencies, and somewhere between $15 and $40 a month by DIY platforms. Both feel reasonable in isolation. Neither is the full picture. This guide walks through every common pricing model, what each one really costs over three years, and what a fair price looks like for the kind of 5–7 page site most small businesses actually need.
A friend of mine runs a small auto shop in Burlington. Last year he got three quotes for a new website: $4,800, $7,500, and $12,000. All three were from real, legitimate agencies. None of them were trying to rip him off. The scope was almost identical: 6 pages, mobile-friendly, contact form, photo gallery, booking integration.
The reason for the spread isn't that one website is "$7,200 better" than another. The reason is that small business website pricing in Canada has almost nothing to do with the website. It's about who's selling it. Different sellers, different overhead, different markups, different ideas about what counts as "scope." Same site.
This guide is the one I wish my friend had before he started getting quotes. It covers what each pricing model actually includes, where the money really goes, and what a fair total cost of ownership looks like over a realistic 3-year window. By the end, you'll have a good sense of what your business should pay — and what it definitely shouldn't.
Before pricing, there's a different question that determines everything: what is the website actually supposed to do?
For most Canadian small businesses, a website does one of four things. Most do exactly one of them well. Trying to make it do all four is where budgets blow up.
The first one — look legitimate — is what 80% of small Canadian businesses actually need. The owner of the auto shop above didn't need a $12,000 site. He needed a site that made people who Googled him on a Tuesday afternoon think "okay, real shop, let me call." That site costs $500 to $2,000 to build, and it's the same site whether the quote says $500 or $12,000.
Once you know which of the four you actually need, the pricing question gets a lot simpler.
There are essentially four routes you can take. Each one has its own pricing logic, its own trade-offs, and its own range of "fair." Here they are in order of typical upfront cost.
Typical cost: $15–$40/month, ongoing forever.
You build it yourself using a drag-and-drop builder. No designer involved. The platform hosts it, gives you the templates, and bills you monthly for as long as you have the site.
Typical cost: $500–$4,000 one-time, depending on the freelancer and country.
A single person — designer, developer, or both — builds the site on a platform of their choice. You usually own the result and host it yourself (or with them).
Typical cost: $5,000–$25,000 one-time, plus often a retainer.
A team of designers, developers, project managers, and account leads builds the site. Includes discovery, brand work, strategy, and ongoing support. Lots of process, lots of meetings, lots of overhead reflected in the price.
Typical cost: $400–$2,000 one-time, fixed price.
A small team builds you a website from a tightly defined template-based system. No discovery sprint. No 14-week timeline. Fixed scope, fixed price, 1–4 weeks to launch.
The rest of this guide unpacks each of these in detail, with real numbers and total cost of ownership math, so you can figure out which one makes sense for your business.
The DIY platforms are advertised everywhere, and the headline pricing always sounds great. $16 a month for a website! $19 a month for a store! The pricing pages are designed to make this feel obvious.
The catch isn't that the platforms are bad. They're not. Squarespace makes legitimately nice-looking sites. Shopify is genuinely good at e-commerce. The catch is in two places: the total monthly bill and the hidden cost of your time.
| Platform | Headline plan | Real monthly cost (after add-ons) | 3-year cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Squarespace Personal | ~$23 CAD/mo | $25–35 (with domain + email) | $900–$1,260 |
| Squarespace Business | ~$33 CAD/mo | $40–55 (with domain + email + extensions) | $1,440–$1,980 |
| Wix Light | ~$22 CAD/mo | $28–40 | $1,000–$1,440 |
| Wix Core / Business | ~$34 CAD/mo | $40–60 | $1,440–$2,160 |
| Shopify Basic | ~$39 CAD/mo | $50–90 (with apps + theme) | $1,800–$3,240 |
| GoDaddy Premium | ~$25 CAD/mo | $30–45 | $1,080–$1,620 |
Those numbers above are billing only. They don't include the hours you spend building the site, the hours you spend rebuilding it six months later when you realize the original layout doesn't work, or the hours you spend wrestling with the platform's quirks.
Most owner-operators who actually build their own site spend 20–60 hours on the first build, plus another 10–20 hours over the year tinkering with it. At even a conservative $40/hour for your time, that's $1,200–$3,200 in unbilled labour on top of the subscription. DIY is rarely actually the cheapest option once you count the owner's hours honestly.
DIY is the right call in a few specific situations:
We'll build you a free homepage mockup so you can compare against any DIY draft you've started. No pitch, no obligation.
Get a free mockup →"Hire a freelancer" is the most popular middle-ground answer, and it's also the most unpredictable. Two freelancers with the same job title can quote you $600 and $4,500 for the same scope. Both can be right, and both can be wrong.
Freelance website pricing in Canada falls into roughly three tiers:
| Tier | Typical price (5–7 page site) | Who they are | Risk profile |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offshore | $300–$1,000 | Overseas freelancers found on Upwork, Fiverr, or marketplace sites. Often working with limited English fluency or limited understanding of the Canadian market. | Mixed. Communication is the biggest risk. Quality can be excellent or terrible. Hard to spot the difference up front. |
| Canadian junior / mid-level | $1,200–$3,500 | Solo freelancers in Canada, often 1–5 years into their career. Designer-developer hybrids. Local time zone, native English (or French). | Good. Communication is easy. Quality varies. Watch for scope creep — fixed quotes can turn into hourly billing fast. |
| Canadian senior / specialist | $3,500–$8,000 | Experienced freelancers, often ex-agency. Strong portfolios, refined process. Often book out weeks or months in advance. | Low risk on quality. Higher risk on timeline (their pipeline is full) and on you being a small fish in their client list. |
The trap with freelancers isn't usually the headline price — it's what's missing from the quote. Things that often aren't in a freelance quote:
If a freelance quote doesn't list these items as included or as separate line items, expect to either do them yourself or get billed for them later. Both are fine — just ask up front.
The quote says "$1,500 for a 5-page website." Three months later, the site isn't done. The freelancer says the work has grown — content revisions, extra pages, an integration. The final bill is $3,800. This isn't necessarily anyone behaving badly. It's the result of a fixed-fee quote without a fixed-scope document underneath it. Always get scope in writing, including what's not included.
Before signing on with a freelancer, do these four things — it takes 30 minutes total and saves a lot of regret:
An agency quote for a small business website usually lands somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000. The website itself almost never costs that much to build. So where does the money go?
Most of it goes to overhead and process. Here's a typical breakdown of what's actually included in a $7,500 agency quote for a 6-page small business website:
Notice the part where the actual website costs about $1,400 to build. The other $6,100 is the process around it. If you're a Canadian small business owner, the honest question is: do you need that process?
For most Canadian small businesses, the agency model is overkill. The $7,500 quote is fine — but the $1,400 of work inside it is fine too, and the difference is mostly process you don't need.
The fourth model — productized website services — is what we do at Wingman, but the model itself isn't ours. It's been around for over a decade, and it's how a lot of solo agencies and small studios across Canada work.
The trade is straightforward: fixed scope, fixed price, fast turnaround. You don't get a discovery sprint, you don't get a custom brand strategy, you don't get 12 weeks of weekly status meetings. You get a 5–7 page modern site, launched in 1–2 weeks, for somewhere between $400 and $2,000.
Productized services start from a battle-tested template system. The studio has built dozens (or hundreds) of similar sites before. They know exactly what works for restaurants, what works for contractors, what works for clinics. Each new site gets customized with your photos, your content, your branding — but the underlying structure is proven.
Because the studio doesn't reinvent the wheel for each project, they can charge a fraction of an agency price while still earning a fair margin. The customer gets a great-looking site fast. The studio doesn't burn out on bespoke 14-week projects.
Our Website Rescue is a productized service. $500 one-time, plus hosting at $25–35/month. 5–7 pages, mobile-first, live in 1–2 weeks. Built by Canadians. Yours forever, even if you cancel everything else. See our services for the full breakdown.
For 80% of Canadian small businesses, those limitations don't matter. The site you need probably already exists in the studio's portfolio with a different logo on it. That's a feature, not a bug.
The fairest way to compare website pricing isn't the upfront cost. It's the total cost of ownership over a realistic window — usually three years, because that's about how long most small business websites stay live before being refreshed.
Here's the 3-year math, all in CAD, for the four common routes. Numbers include hosting, domain, typical maintenance, and platform fees where applicable.
| Route | Upfront | Monthly (avg) | 3-year TCO | Owner time required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DIY on Squarespace Personal | $0 | $28 | ~$1,008 | 40–60 hours |
| DIY on Shopify Basic | $0 | $55 | ~$1,980 | 50–80 hours |
| Offshore freelancer | $700 | $15 hosting | ~$1,240 | 20–40 hours (revisions / fixes) |
| Canadian freelancer (mid) | $2,500 | $30 | ~$3,580 | 10–20 hours |
| Full agency | $7,500 | $100 (retainer) | ~$11,100 | 15–30 hours (meetings) |
| Productized service (Wingman Website Rescue) | $500 | $30 | ~$1,580 | 3–6 hours |
Look at that table for a second and the answer starts to become obvious.
For a typical 5–7 page Canadian small business website, the productized service route lands at roughly the same 3-year cost as DIY ($1,580 vs $1,000–$1,980) — but takes the owner from spending 40–80 hours building it to spending 3–6 hours providing photos and approving drafts. That's the trade. You're paying ~$500–$700 over three years to get back 40+ hours of your time. For most owner-operators, that's the best math on the page.
The agency route ends up costing 5–7× more than the productized route over the same window, for a website that does the same job. The reason isn't quality of work — it's the overhead structure of the agency model.
Hiring a Canadian mid-level freelancer is a fine middle-ground choice. The 3-year cost is moderate, and you get the benefits of a real designer. The trade-off is the variance — finding the right freelancer is the actual project.
Forget the dollar number for a second. The more useful question is: what should a fair quote include? Here's the checklist. A fair quote — at any price — covers all of these.
The next list is what often shows up in agency quotes as "value" but rarely needs to be there for a typical small business:
These are the actual warning signs in a website quote. Each one alone isn't a deal-breaker. Two or more in the same quote means walk.
A fair quote has a scope document. Pages listed, features listed, what's included, what's not. If the quote is one paragraph and a price, you're paying for an open-ended commitment that will balloon.
Hosting can be annual or monthly. The build should be a one-time fee, or a clearly defined month-to-month relationship. Anyone asking you to sign a 24-month contract for a website is making their business model your problem.
The domain and hosting accounts should be in your name. Always. If the agency or freelancer registers the domain under their account "for convenience," you don't actually own your website — you're renting it from them, and switching providers becomes a hostage negotiation.
Nobody can guarantee Google rankings. The companies that promise it are either lying or planning to spam-link your site in ways that get it penalized within 6 months. Any reputable provider talks about SEO in terms of best practices and probable outcomes, not guarantees.
A $200/month maintenance plan should have a clear monthly work list — content updates, security patches, hosting management, monthly performance reports. "Maintenance" with no items spelled out is a recurring fee with nothing under it.
Every legitimate web builder has a portfolio. If you can't see 5+ live sites they've built, there's a reason. Either the work isn't theirs, or the work isn't good. Either way, move on.
You've probably seen the offers. "Get a free website!" from your card processor, your phone carrier, your domain registrar, your bank. Sometimes they're real. Often they're not. Here's how to tell.
Free template you build yourself. Wix, Weebly, GoDaddy, and most of the DIY platforms offer a "free" tier. The catch is that the site has the platform's branding on it, you can't use your own domain, and you're upgraded to paid the moment you want it to look like a real business. The free tier is a trial. Treat it as a trial.
Free with a long-term lock-in. Some hosting companies and domain registrars offer a "free website builder" with the catch that you have to host with them for a multi-year contract. The website itself is "free" — but you've locked yourself into a $25/month bill for 36 months. The site isn't free. It's just a $900 site with a different pricing schedule.
Free as part of a service trade. This is the more interesting category. Some businesses will build you a real website for free in exchange for switching another service. Card processors are the most common example — they'll cover the cost of a marketing build in exchange for switching your processing to them.
Our Zero Cost Plan is a service trade. We'll cover the cost of your Website Rescue + Social Starter if you switch your card processing to our sister company, Dough Payments. The math has to work in your favour — Dough guarantees a lower processing rate than what you currently pay, and the savings (plus their margin) cover the marketing cost. We don't pitch it unless it actually works. See if you qualify →
The trade-based offers can be legitimately good — but you have to do two things:
Here's the cheat-sheet. Find your business below and the recommendation is what we'd tell a friend in that situation.
You need a site that makes someone Googling you at 7pm on a Sunday call instead of scroll past. You don't need a brand strategy session. Get something live in 2 weeks for under $1,500. Reinvest the savings into Google Business Profile reviews — they matter more than the website's design.
If you take card payments, look at a payments-for-marketing trade. The math often works for trades businesses.
Related: Contractors & Home Services
Customers want three things from your website: menu, hours, location. The "look legitimate" job is everything for restaurants. Don't spend $7,500 on a flashy site. Spend $500 on a clean site and put the rest into food photos and Instagram content.
If you sell online (delivery, gift cards, e-commerce), Shopify or a productized Shopify build is the right call. Budget $1,500–$3,500.
Related: Restaurants & Food
The website is the launchpad to your booking system. The most important feature is "Book Now" being two clicks from any page. Whatever platform you use (Jane App, Mindbody, Booksy, GlossGenius, Vagaro), the website should hand off cleanly. Don't overspend on a custom build.
Related: Health & Personal Care
If the website is just to show people where the store is and what you sell, productized service at $500–$1,500. If you sell online, that's e-commerce and the budget changes — figure $1,500–$3,500 for a productized Shopify build. Don't pay an agency $10K for a small retail site.
Related: Retail
For B2B and professional services, your website's job is signalling competence. The copy and tone matter more than features. Productized still works — but spend extra time on the copy. If you can't write your own bio in a confident voice, that's the part to hire out.
Related: Professional Services
Photos of your bay and your work matter more than the website design. A clean productized site + 20 good shop photos beats a $7K custom site with stock images every time. Spend the bigger investment on the photographer, not the developer.
Related: Automotive · Auto Detailers
For a 5–7 page modern website with mobile-first design, contact form, click-to-call, Google Business Profile integration, and basic SEO setup, a fair price in 2026 is $500–$2,500 one-time, plus $25–35/month for hosting. Anything materially above that range needs justification in scope.
Because agency overhead is real. Account managers, project managers, designers, developers, and partners all need to be paid. None of it is fraud — it's just a different business model with different overhead. The honest question is whether the value matches your business needs. For most small businesses, it doesn't.
Hosting, yes ($25–35/month). The website itself, no. If a provider is charging $100+/month indefinitely for "the website," ask what specifically they do every month. If there's no clear answer, you're paying rent on a site you should already own.
For very small, very local businesses (a one-person mobile dog grooming service, for example), maybe not — but for anything else, yes. A real website is what makes the Google Business Profile and Facebook page look legitimate. They reinforce each other.
Productized service: 1–4 weeks. Freelancer: 4–10 weeks. Agency: 8–16 weeks. DIY: depends entirely on you. Most small businesses dramatically overestimate how long it should take — if a provider's quoting 14+ weeks for a 6-page site, ask why.
This is what we call a "rescue." The cost to fix a bad site is usually within $200 of the cost of starting fresh — you're paying for the new design and structure, not the demolition. Don't pay extra to "fix" a site that should just be rebuilt.
You should. The domain should be in your name. The hosting account should be in your name. The design files should be deliverable to you. If anything is "shared" or "licensed" or "managed for you" in a way that means you can't leave, that's not ownership — that's a hostage situation. Walk.
The website is the design and the content. Hosting is the server that makes it live on the internet. Hosting is an ongoing cost ($10–40/month depending on the provider). The website is usually a one-time cost. They get bundled in DIY platforms (which is why DIY feels "monthly"), but they're separate things on a self-hosted site.
Yes — as long as you own your domain and your hosting account, and have access to your design files or website backend. Switching providers usually takes 1–2 weeks. The biggest variable is whether your current provider plays nice during the handover. (Reputable ones do.)
$500 one-time. Done by Canadians. Live in 1–2 weeks. Month-to-month hosting. No contracts, no surprises. Or get it free with the Zero Cost Plan if you're open to switching processors.
See how it works →Free 15-minute call. No pitch, no pressure. If we can help, we'll tell you how. If you'd be better off elsewhere, we'll tell you that too.
Get Started Free → Just a neighbour helping a neighbour.