Almost every quote you will be shown covers the build. The build is the number people compare, argue about and budget for. Then the site launches, and a second number starts running quietly in the background for as long as the site exists.
Nobody sends you that number in advance, so here it is, line by line, in Canadian dollars for a small business site.
The floor: what every site pays
Domain: $15 to $30 a year. A .ca or .com renewal. Watch the second-year price on registrars that discount the first year, and turn auto-renew on. A lapsed domain is the single cheapest way to lose a business online.
Hosting: $0 to $600 a year. This range is not a mistake. A static marketing site on a modern platform can genuinely cost nothing to host. A WordPress site needs real managed hosting, and the honest range there is $200 to $600 a year. Anything advertised at $3 a month is oversold shared hosting, and you will meet it again as a slow site.
SSL certificate: $0. It should be included. If someone is billing you separately for a basic certificate, that is a line to question.
Email: $0 to $150 a year per mailbox. Forwarding is free. A real mailbox on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is roughly $8 to $12 a month.
For a simple, well-built site that is the whole list: call it $50 to $800 a year, mostly determined by the platform.
Where the platform decides the bill
Shopify is the clearest case, because the fee is public: the entry plan runs roughly $50 CAD a month, so about $600 a year before apps. Apps are where store owners get surprised. Three or four at $20 to $50 a month each, and you have quietly added another $1,000 to $2,000 a year. Audit them once a quarter and delete what nobody uses.
WordPress looks free and is not. Managed hosting, a premium theme licence, a form plugin, a backup plugin, a security plugin, maybe a page builder. Individually small, together $300 to $1,500 a year in licences on top of hosting. Every one of those licences also has to stay renewed, or the plugin stops receiving security updates while continuing to run.
A custom-built site has the lowest recurring floor, because there is no plugin stack to license and often no hosting bill worth mentioning. The trade-off sits in the build, not the year.
The line most people skip: someone maintaining it
This is the real answer to the question, and the one that is uncomfortable to quote.
A website is not furniture. Platforms release updates, plugins break each other, browsers change, forms silently stop delivering, SSL configs drift, and Google changes what it rewards. A site with nobody looking at it does not stay level. It degrades, quietly, and the first visible symptom is usually a form that has been swallowing enquiries for two months.
You have three options, and all of them cost something:
- Do it yourself. Free in dollars. Perhaps an hour a month if nothing goes wrong, and a bad afternoon when something does.
- Call someone when it breaks. $100 to $180 an hour in Ontario, and you pay it in the worst moment, when the site is already down.
- A care plan. Ours starts at $129 a month and covers monitoring, platform and security updates, backups, developer hours for fixes and small improvements, and ongoing speed and SEO upkeep. Month to month.
The honest way to read those options: a care plan is not insurance against disaster, it is the difference between a site that improves and a site that decays. Most of the value is the small monthly changes nobody would ever raise a support ticket for.
What a realistic year looks like
Three sites, all of them real shapes rather than illustrations:
A five-page site for a trades business. Domain $20, hosting included in the build platform, no plugin stack, owner updates the text occasionally. Roughly $20 to $150 a year, plus whatever a fix costs on the rare occasion one is needed.
A WordPress site with a blog and forms. Domain $20, managed hosting $400, plugin licences $500, and either your own hours or a maintenance plan. $900 to $2,500 a year with a plan, around $920 without one and with more risk.
A Shopify store doing real volume. Platform $600, apps $1,200, domain $20, plus transaction fees that scale with sales, plus someone keeping the theme and the catalogue in order. $1,800 to $4,000 a year before anyone touches the design.
Set against the one-time build number, the annual cost is usually 10 to 25 percent of it. That is the ratio to plan around.
Where the money is genuinely wasted
Apps and plugins nobody uses. The most common finding on any store audit. Six months after launch, half the stack is dead weight that still bills monthly and still slows the site down.
Paying for hosting nobody needed. A brochure site on a $50 a month plan sized for an application.
Paying twice for the same thing. An SEO plugin licence and an SEO retainer. A backup plugin and a host that already backs up.
"Unlimited support" that is never used. If the plan has no monthly deliverable, you are paying for the right to phone someone.
Against that, the thing most often cut and most often regretted: speed and upkeep. It is invisible until traffic arrives and does not convert.
The question to ask your current provider
Ask for a written list of every recurring charge attached to your website, who holds each account, and what the renewal date is. If that takes more than a day to produce, that in itself is the finding, and it usually means the accounts are not in your name.
If you would rather have someone else read it, send us the site. The teardown is free, it comes back in two business days, and it will tell you what you are paying for that you do not need.