Ask five agencies what a website costs and you will get five ranges, three of which start with "it depends". That is technically true and completely useless when you are trying to budget. So here are real numbers, what sits behind them, and the questions that actually move the price up or down.
Everything below is in Canadian dollars and reflects what an Ontario business pays a small studio in 2026, not what an enterprise agency in Toronto charges a bank.
The short version
- What a site costs depends on what is in it, and the current figures for your country are on the pricing page.
- What a site costs depends on what is in it, and the current figures for your country are on the pricing page.
- What a site costs depends on what is in it, and the current figures for your country are on the pricing page.
- Ongoing care is a monthly plan, and its current price for your country is on the pricing page.
If a quote comes in far under those numbers, something is being left out. Usually it is the design (a bought template with your logo dropped in), the content (you write everything), or the follow-through (nobody is responsible once it is live).
What actually moves the price
Page count matters less than you think
Ten near-identical service pages cost far less than three genuinely different ones. The work is in the thinking and the design of each distinct layout, not in duplicating a layout you already built. When a quote scales purely per page, ask what changes between them.
Custom design versus a refined template
A template with your colours is cheap and looks like the other businesses using it. Custom design costs more because someone is making decisions about your specific offer, your photos, and what a visitor should notice first. For a local service business the template may genuinely be enough. If you sell something considered, where trust is the whole battle, it usually is not.
What has to connect to it
This is where budgets move fastest. A brochure site that emails a form is straightforward. A site that has to sync inventory, price by customer tier, take deposits, push leads into a CRM and handle bilingual content is a different project. Integrations are where hours hide, so name them early rather than discovering them in week four.
Who writes the content
Almost every project that runs late runs late for this reason. If a studio is writing the copy and organizing photography, that is real work and should be priced. If you are supplying it, the price drops but the deadline now depends on you.
Bilingual English and French
In Ottawa, and for anyone selling to the federal government, this is not optional. Doing it properly means separate addresses, correct language tagging, and translated navigation, forms and error messages, not just the marketing text. Expect it to add meaningfully to the cost, and be suspicious of anyone who says a plugin handles it.
What a website should include before you call it done
Some studios treat these as line items. They are the baseline:
- Fast on a real phone on a real connection, not just on the demo laptop
- Search-ready structure: sensible headings, clean addresses, metadata that is not left blank
- Accessible to WCAG 2.2 AA, which in Ontario is also a legal consideration for larger organizations and happens to help your ranking
- Analytics wired in, so you can tell whether it is working
- Editable by your team afterwards, with the documentation to do it
- Redirects planned if you are replacing an existing site
That last point is worth its own paragraph.
The hidden cost nobody quotes: losing your rankings
If you already have a site that earns traffic, a redesign can quietly destroy it. Old addresses disappear, nothing points the search engine to the new ones, and three months later the enquiries have dried up while everyone congratulates each other on how modern the site looks.
The fix is not expensive, it is just unglamorous: map every old address to its new one, keep the pages that already earn visits, and verify after launch rather than assuming. When you compare quotes, ask directly how the migration will be handled. The answer tells you a lot about who you are dealing with.
How to read a web design quote
Four questions cut through most of the ambiguity:
- What is fixed and what is hourly? A fixed range means the studio has thought the project through. Pure hourly means you carry the risk of their estimate being wrong.
- What happens if we want changes halfway? Some revision is normal and should be included. Unlimited revisions usually means the price is padded to survive them.
- Who owns the site at the end? You should own the code, the domain and the accounts. If leaving means losing the site, that is not a service, it is a hostage arrangement.
- What happens the day after launch? A site is not finished when it goes live. Ask who fixes things, and what that costs.
So what should you budget?
Ongoing care is a monthly plan, and its current price for your country is on the pricing page. What a site costs depends on what is in it, and the current figures for your country are on the pricing page. If you are replacing a site that already brings in business, add the migration conversation to every quote you request.
One number the build quote will not contain: what the site costs to keep running after launch. Hosting, licences, apps and upkeep typically add 10 to 25 percent of the build, every year.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your site, send it to me and I will tell you what I would fix first and what it would cost, the same working day.