If you've asked three people what a website should cost, you've probably heard three wildly different numbers. A friend built theirs on Wix for $30 a month. A freelancer quoted you $2,000. An agency in London came back at $12,000, and now you're wondering whether somebody's taking you for a ride.
Usually nobody is. Those three numbers are for three very different things that all happen to be called a website. I build websites for small businesses in St. Thomas, London and across Elgin County, and this is the same breakdown I walk owners through before they spend a dollar, including what I charge.
These are the rough ranges you'll see across Ontario right now. Where you land depends on how many pages you need, how much writing and photography is included, and whether the site has to handle things like online booking or payments.
Building it yourself on a platform like Wix, Squarespace or Shopify usually runs about $15 to $60 a month. That gets you the platform and a template, and the design, writing and troubleshooting are yours to do.
A freelancer will typically charge somewhere around $500 to $3,000 for a small business site. You get a real person building around your business, but quality and aftercare vary a lot from one freelancer to the next.
A small or local agency usually lands between $3,000 and $15,000 for a custom build. You're paying for a proper design process and, in most cases, more help with content and getting found on Google.
A larger agency starts around $15,000 and climbs from there. That's bigger teams, bigger projects and more meetings, and it's rarely what a local trades or service business needs.
The build price is only part of the bill, and it's the part everyone compares. Here's what tends to show up later.
Your domain name, the .ca address people type in, usually costs $15 to $30 a year. Hosting and upkeep come next, either as a monthly platform fee or as someone you call when a form stops sending or something breaks after an update. If you're writing your own pages and taking your own photos, that's time you're paying for too.
The biggest hidden cost on a DIY site is your own time. A first website commonly eats 40 to 100 hours of evenings and weekends, and plenty of them launch half finished and stay that way.
Then there's getting found. A site that looks great but that Google can't make sense of won't bring in many calls, and SEO is often quoted separately from the build, if it's quoted at all.
One of my clients, Dwayne at PMD Excavation built his first website himself on WordPress, and for a beginner he did alright. The problem was that Google wasn't showing it to anyone, and the site sat on page 6. After we rebuilt it, PMD went from page 6 to page 1 on Google in 4 weeks.
That's why I'd push you to look past the price of the build and ask a different question: what's one new customer worth to you? If a single job is worth $2,000 to your business, a site that brings in one extra job a month pays for itself, and a site nobody finds costs you that same amount every month you leave it alone.
I'd rather show you my numbers than make you book a call to get them. We don't build a site and walk away, so every plan is a one-time setup fee plus a monthly fee, and the monthly fee covers the work that keeps your site bringing in calls after it launches.
Spark is $1,397 to set up, then $397 a month. You get a one-page lead capture site, follow-up texts and emails for every new lead, a text back when you miss a call, review requests, and basic local SEO.
Growth is $1,597 to set up, then $697 a month. It includes everything in Spark, plus a mobile-first 5-page website, full local SEO management, a new blog post every month, and a monthly report so you know what's working.
Domination is $1,897 to set up, then $1,197 a month. It includes everything in Growth, plus fully managed Google or Meta ads, two blog posts a month, and competitor tracking.
Put plainly, a first year on Growth comes to about $10,000 all in. That's in the same range as a custom agency build, except the year of local SEO, fresh content and lead follow-up is already included, so the site keeps working for you after launch day. You can see the full breakdown on our plans and pricing page, or look through the local websites we've built in St. Thomas and across Southwestern Ontario.
Building it yourself makes sense if you're just starting out, most of your customers find you by word of mouth, and you enjoy the work. A freelancer or a one-time agency build makes sense if you need a solid site and you're prepared to handle SEO and upkeep yourself or pay someone separately for it.
A done-for-you plan makes sense when the website has to bring in calls and you'd rather be on the job than on your laptop at 10 p.m. That's the moment to fire yourself from being your own web designer and hand it off.
If you already have a website, you might not need a new one at all. Our free SEO audit shows you what Google sees when it looks at your site and what's keeping your phone quiet, so you'll know whether a few fixes will do the job or it's time to rebuild.
