How much does a website cost in Canada?

What the two Canadian ranges say

Two of the pages Canadians find when they search this question give a figure.

Side by side, they meet at $10,000 and nowhere else. The bottom of BDC’s range is five times the bottom of onepagepro.ca’s, and the two together run from $2,000 to $30,000, which is fifteen times from one end to the other. A spread like that usually means one word is covering several different products.

I haven’t seen the jobs behind either figure, so I can’t tell you what each one counted. Both pages are worth reading in full before you ask anyone for a quote.

Why the same question gets such different answers

"Website" covers at least four jobs, and they are priced very differently.

• A small site that explains the business. Home, services, about, contact. It is enough for a business whose customers mostly call or walk in, and most of the cost is design and writing.
• A bigger site built to be found. A page for each service and each area you serve, an FAQ, perhaps a blog. Every extra page has to be written and has to make sense to someone who lands on it from a search.
• A site that has to do something. Take a payment, hold a booking, sell thirty products with tax and shipping. Each of those needs testing, including what happens when it goes wrong.
• A site joined to the rest of the business. A link into the CRM, inventory or booking system you already pay for. Nobody can price that without seeing the software, so it is usually quoted on its own.

Then there is who does the work. An agency quote pays for an office, a project manager and an account manager as well as the designer, and in return you get a team that keeps going when one person is off sick. One designer working alone has neither the cost nor the cover. The same twelve pages can be quoted in different ranges for that reason alone.

A published range blends all of these together. How one quote is put together, by the hour, by the page or by the feature, is a separate subject. What a website costs in Vancouver walks through it, along with the costs that tend to sit outside the quote.

Where $999 and $1,999 sit against those ranges

These are my prices. They are the same anywhere in Canada, priced on page count alone, and they match the pricing page.

Both tiers are designed from scratch with the words written for you, work on every phone, include two revision rounds and set up your Google Business Profile before launch. A site goes live about three weeks after you approve the direction.

Against the published figures, $999 is under half the bottom of onepagepro.ca’s range, and $1,999 is a dollar below it. BDC’s lowest figure is about ten times the five-page price.

Systems are added to a tier. A booking tool wired in and tested is included. A shop is $2,400. A spreadsheet you edit yourself, for prices, a menu or opening hours, is $1,800. A link to software you already run is quoted in writing. Five pages with a spreadsheet you edit is $999 plus $1,800, so $2,799. Fifteen pages with a shop is $1,999 plus $2,400, or $4,399. Both of those land inside onepagepro.ca’s range and well under BDC’s.

Past fifteen pages the site is quoted in writing, with no published figure. A site that size is a different job, and any number I printed for it would be a guess.

Why the price comes in under the published ranges

The gap comes from how the work is scoped and who does it.

The scope is fixed before anything starts. You get a page limit, two revision rounds and a price in writing, and that price is what you pay. Nothing is estimated in hours, so there is no padding in it for hours that might run over.

There is one person. There is no office, project manager or account manager in the price. That has a cost of its own: if I am ill, nobody else picks the work up. If you want a team and a weekly status call, an agency is the better buy, and the agency comparison sets out what each choice costs you.

The sites are plain pages. They have no login, no content management system and no plugins, so there is no software licence folded into the price and far less to keep patched.

What the low price does not include

A low number only helps if you know where it stops. These sit outside the build price:

• The domain, registered in your name so you own it, and renewed each year.
• Paid stock photos or licensed fonts, and only if you want them.
• Software you choose, such as a booking or payment tool, which you pay for directly.
• Sales tax. Every figure on this page is before tax, and GST is added where it applies.
• Editing it yourself. There is no login. Changes go through Care, or through the $1,800 spreadsheet for the parts that change often.
• Anything past fifteen pages or wired into your own software, which is quoted in writing first.

Care is $99 a month and is the only monthly plan for a website. It covers hosting, backups, security and two small edits a month, each back within 48 hours. It is optional, with a three-month minimum and then 30 days notice. A site you bought is yours from launch, files included, and if you move it to another host the handover is free. For what upkeep costs in general and what a monthly fee ought to cover, read what website maintenance costs.

Using the ranges when a quote arrives

When a quote comes in, put it next to the two figures above and ask what it is paying for. A quote near BDC’s range should name the extra pages, systems or people it covers. A quote under onepagepro.ca’s range should say in writing what it leaves out. Until it does either, the number on its own tells you very little.

If you have a site already and want to know what it needs before you ask anyone, the free website audit tests it the way a customer uses it and comes back with a fixed price by email.