"How much should my website cost?" doesn't have one answer, because "a website" isn't one product. A single page that lists your hours and phone number and a twelve-page site with online booking, a blog, and e-commerce are both technically "a website" — and they shouldn't cost the same. Here's what you should actually expect to pay in 2026, broken down by who's building it.
Prices below are in USD. Canadian pricing runs roughly similar dollar-for-dollar, sometimes 10-20% higher once you factor in GST/HST and a smaller pool of local freelancers to choose from — so treat these as a solid baseline either side of the border.
The five ways to get a website built
DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy). $15-$60/month, no build fee if you do it yourself. The cheapest route by far, and genuinely fine for a simple site if you have the time to learn the tool and the patience to fight its templates. The real cost here is your own hours — and the ceiling is low the moment you need something the builder wasn't designed for.
Freelancers. $500-$5,000 for a small business site, depending on experience and location. The spread is huge because quality and reliability are huge variables. A good freelancer can be excellent value. A bad one can disappear mid-project with your deposit — it happens more than the industry likes to admit, and there's rarely a backup plan when it does.
Productized/flat-rate studios (like us). $500-$2,500 for a standard small business site, fixed price, usually live within a week. The tradeoff for speed and price certainty is less hand-holding and fewer rounds of open-ended revisions than a traditional agency — you're buying a well-run process, not a bespoke creative partnership.
Traditional agencies. $3,000-$15,000+. You're paying for strategy, custom design from scratch, and a dedicated account team. Worth it for complex brands and larger budgets; overkill for a five-page site for a local plumbing company.
Enterprise/custom development. $15,000-$100,000+. Custom web applications, complex integrations, multi-market sites. Most small businesses will never need this tier, and if someone quotes you here for a brochure site, get a second opinion.
What actually drives the price up
Within any of those tiers, a handful of things move the number:
- Page count. A single landing page and a 15-page site with a blog, team page, and service pages for six locations are different amounts of work, full stop.
- E-commerce. Adding a store — products, cart, checkout, shipping rules, tax — typically adds 30-100% to a build's cost over a brochure site of similar size.
- Custom design vs. template. A design built from scratch, with original graphics and a unique layout, costs meaningfully more than a well-executed template. Not everyone needs custom — plenty of great small business sites run on smart template work.
- Integrations. Booking systems, CRMs, payment processors, membership logins, and third-party APIs all add build time, and often add their own monthly fees on top.
- Content. If you're supplying all your own copy and photos, that's cheaper than asking the studio to write and source everything from scratch.
The hidden costs almost nobody budgets for
This is where most people get the real number wrong — not the build price, the ongoing price.
- Hosting. $10-$50/month typically, sometimes bundled into your build price for the first year (ask specifically).
- Domain renewal. $15-$25/year, easy to forget until it lapses.
- Maintenance. WordPress core, themes, and plugins need updates on an ongoing basis — this is not optional, it's security. Budget $50-$250/month depending on how much hands-on support you want (see our guide to what's actually in a care plan).
- The "just one more thing" tax. Almost every site needs a small edit three weeks after launch — a new phone number, a seasonal promo, a typo someone finally noticed. If your provider charges a one-off hourly rate for every single change, that adds up fast. This is usually the single biggest gap between "the website cost" and "what the website actually cost by month six."
How to tell if a quote is fair
Ask three questions of any quote, from a freelancer or an agency:
- What exactly is included — and what's billed separately after launch? A fair quote tells you what happens the day after the site goes live, not just what happens before.
- How many revision rounds are built in? Unlimited revisions sound great and usually mean the project never ends. Two to three focused rounds is normal and healthy.
- Who owns the site when it's done? You should get full access to your hosting, domain, and files — not a login that only works through your provider's dashboard forever.
The bottom line
For most small businesses — trades, local services, professional services, niche B2B — a fixed-price build in the $500-$2,500 range, plus a modest monthly care plan afterward, covers the job without over- or under-paying. The number that matters isn't the sticker price on day one; it's what you're actually spending twelve months in, once hosting, maintenance, and the inevitable small edits are added up.