How much does a small business website cost in Canada?

Nobody wants to be the person who paid $12,000 for a website their nephew could have built, or the person who paid $800 and got nothing that brings in work. Here are the real ranges we see in Ottawa and across Canada, and what moves the number.

The four tiers, roughly

Do it yourself on a builder (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify): about $20 to $60 a month, plus your evenings. Fine for a side business or a one-page card. The hidden cost is your time and the ceiling you hit when you want forms, bookings and tracking to work together.
A freelancer with a template: typically $1,500 to $5,000 for a 5 to 8 page site. Good value if the freelancer is reliable and you supply the words and photos. The risk is what happens in year two when they've moved on.
An agency, custom design: $5,000 to $25,000 and up. You're paying for strategy, writing, design, speed, search set-up and someone accountable afterwards. Worth it when the website is how you win jobs, not a brochure.
Website plus the machine behind it: site, CRM, booking, automated follow-up, ads landing pages. Usually $8,000 to $30,000 as a project, sometimes split into monthly phases. This is the tier that changes revenue, because the site stops being a page and becomes a system.

What you pay after launch

Budget for the boring stuff: domain ($15 to $30 a year), hosting ($0 to $50 a month depending on the stack), email, and someone to keep plugins, security and content current. A realistic maintenance range is $50 to $300 a month. A "free" site that nobody maintains is the most expensive kind two years later.

The four things that move the price

Words and photos. If you have them, the price drops. If the agency has to write every page and shoot every photo, it rises.
Number of pages and templates. Twenty service pages with the same layout cost less than six pages that each need a different design.
Integrations. Online booking, payments, a CRM, a members' area, bilingual content. Each is a real piece of work.
Who owns it afterwards. Make sure you own the domain, the hosting account and the code. Cheap deals sometimes keep you renting.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

What exactly is included, page by page?
Who writes the content?
How fast will the site load on a phone? Ask for a score, not a promise.
What happens to leads from the contact form — where do they land, who gets the alert?
What is the monthly cost after launch, and what does it cover?

Our take

For a service business in Ottawa, the website that pays for itself is rarely the cheapest or the most expensive. It is the one connected to a follow-up system, built to load fast on a phone, and written for the person searching at 9pm with a problem. We quote every project as a fixed price after a free call, so you know the number before anything starts.