Real numbers, honestly explained, including what everyone else charges and where our own $999 starter package sits. Written by a Halton web design shop that has been quoting this work since 1999.
The short answer
A three-page starter website in Ontario costs about $999 to $1,500 as a one-time fee. A five to ten page custom site runs $3,000 to $6,000. E-commerce starts around $4,000. Full agency projects with brand strategy run $5,000 to $25,000. Hosting adds $20 to $30 a month whichever route you take.
That range is wide because the word website covers a three-page brochure site and a fifty-page platform with a booking engine. What follows breaks it down properly, including the ongoing costs most quotes leave out and the four questions that will tell you whether a quote is fair.
We publish this because almost nobody else does, and that lack of transparency is exactly why small business owners end up overpaying. We are a web design company, so we have an interest here. Read it with that in mind and check the numbers against two other quotes.
The brackets
Usually a template or a trap. At this level you are buying a purchased theme with your logo dropped in and an hour of configuration, an offshore marketplace build with no support after delivery, or a low headline price attached to a multi-year hosting contract. Some are fine. Most are not, and the failure mode is expensive: no SEO groundwork, forms that quietly do not send, and nobody reachable when something breaks.
The honest floor for real design work. Three to five pages, custom designed, mobile-first, working contact form, on-page SEO foundations, analytics connected, and you own the files. Two to three weeks. Right for new businesses, trades, single-service operators, and anyone currently running off a Facebook page. This is where our $999 package sits.
When you have things to organise. Up to about ten pages, structure designed around your services rather than a theme, full on-page SEO, schema markup, two rounds of revisions. Worth it when you have several service lines, multiple locations or service areas to rank for, or a brand that genuinely needs to look different from your competition.
Selling online. WooCommerce or Shopify, product catalogue, payment gateway, Ontario tax and shipping rules configured properly, inventory, mobile checkout, staff training. The variables are catalogue size and how much your existing systems need to talk to it. See e-commerce web design.
Strategy, brand and custom functionality. Discovery, brand work, user research, custom development, project management, an account team. Genuinely worth it for multi-location businesses, funded startups and companies with a marketing budget to match. Considerable overkill for a two-person landscaping company, and plenty of them get sold it anyway.
No build fee, permanent rent. Wix, Squarespace, Shopify. Three years costs $700 to $1,800 and you have done the designing and writing. You cannot move the site to another host, and the bill never stops. Reasonable if you enjoy building it and your business is simple.
The part quotes leave out
The build price is the number everyone compares. These are the numbers that determine what the site actually costs you over five years.
Shared hosting at the low end, managed WordPress hosting at the high end. Cheaper hosting means slower load times, and speed is a Google ranking factor, so the saving is not always a saving.
A .ca or .com renewed annually. Make sure it is registered in your name, not your web designer’s. This causes more grief than any other single item on this list.
Should be free and automatic with any decent host in 2026. If someone is charging you $200 a year for one, that is worth a conversation.
Updates, backups, security patches, uptime monitoring, small content changes. Optional, and you can do it yourself if you are comfortable. See maintenance and hosting.
Entirely optional and entirely separate from the build. Worth it in a competitive market, wasted if your business does not depend on search. See SEO services.
Forms, booking, security, backups, page builders. Easy to forget when comparing quotes, and they renew whether you use them or not.
A realistic five-year total for a small business: a $999 build plus $25 a month hosting comes to roughly $2,500. The same business on a DIY builder at $35 a month comes to $2,100 with all the work done by them. An agency build at $6,000 plus maintenance comes to about $12,000. All three are defensible. They just suit different businesses.
Before you sign
If the answer is anything other than you, walk. Some builds sit on proprietary platforms you can never move off. You should leave with the files, the database and the domain, whenever you like.
Neither answer is wrong, but the price should match. A well-configured template is a fair $1,200. It is not a fair $5,000. Ask directly and expect a straight answer.
Build plus hosting plus maintenance plus licences. A $299 site with a required $99 monthly plan is $3,863 over three years. That is the number to compare, not the headline.
Any honest quote can answer this immediately. Content writing, photography, SEO, e-commerce, extra pages. Vagueness here is the single most reliable predictor of a surprise invoice.
Our numbers
Every quote we give is fixed-fee and itemized in writing before any work starts. No hourly meter, no surprise invoices, no long-term contract.
Three pages of your choosing, custom designed, SEO foundations, launched in two to three weeks. Extra pages $175 each.
See what’s included →Up to ten pages, structure built around your services, full on-page SEO, two rounds of revisions.
See web design →WooCommerce or Shopify, payments, Ontario tax and shipping, inventory and training.
See e-commerce →Hosting, SSL, backups and uptime monitoring. Month to month, cancel whenever, take the site with you.
See hosting →More on the entry-level option: affordable website design and the small business package by industry. We work across Oakville, Mississauga, Milton, Burlington, Halton Hills, Orangeville and Caledon.
Questions
The questions people search for, with numbers attached rather than “it depends.”
A three-page starter website costs about $999 to $1,500 as a one-time fee. A five to ten page custom small business site runs $3,000 to $6,000. An e-commerce store starts around $4,000. A full agency project with brand strategy and custom functionality runs $5,000 to $25,000 or more. On top of any of those, expect $20 to $30 a month for hosting and about $20 a year for the domain.
Most small local businesses in Ontario are well served between $999 and $6,000. Below $999 you are usually buying a template with an hour of configuration, or a low headline price attached to a multi-year hosting contract. Above $6,000 you should be getting brand strategy, custom functionality or e-commerce, not just more pages. If a quote sits outside that band, ask what specifically accounts for it.
Three variables explain nearly all of it: whether the design is custom or a purchased theme, how many pages and how much custom functionality is involved, and the overhead of the company quoting. A downtown Toronto agency with an office, an account team and a project manager has costs a two-person shop in Halton Hills does not. Same site, very different invoice.
Hosting at $10 to $30 a month for a small business site, a domain at roughly $20 a year, and an SSL certificate that should be included free with any decent host. Optional on top: maintenance and updates at $50 to $150 a month, and SEO work at $500 to $2,000 a month depending on how competitive your market is. Anyone who tells you the ongoing cost is nothing has not mentioned something yet.
Cheaper in cash, expensive in time. Wix or Squarespace runs $20 to $50 a month with no build fee, so three years costs $700 to $1,800 and you have done all the design and writing yourself. A one-time $999 build that you own outright and can host anywhere usually works out better financially and definitely better in hours. DIY makes sense if you enjoy it and your business is simple.
A WordPress site on a well-configured theme runs about $1,500 to $2,500 in Ontario. A custom WordPress build with a bespoke theme runs $3,000 to $8,000. Add hosting suited to WordPress at $15 to $40 a month, and budget for plugin licences, which are easy to forget and typically add $100 to $300 a year. See our WordPress web design page.
WooCommerce or Shopify builds start around $4,000 for a straightforward catalogue and climb from there with product count and integrations. Shopify adds a platform fee of roughly $39 to $105 a month plus transaction fees. WooCommerce has no platform fee but needs better hosting and more maintenance. See e-commerce web design.
A three-page custom starter package, which is why we price ours at $999. It is the point where a designer can still do the job properly: custom layout, mobile-first build, SEO foundations, working forms and full ownership. Cheaper than that and something real is being cut, usually the parts you cannot see until they cost you.
Be careful with these. A $99 a month website deal over 36 months is $3,564 for what is often a template build, and you usually own nothing at the end. Monthly can make sense for hosting, maintenance and SEO, which are genuinely ongoing services. For the build itself, a one-time fee you own is almost always the better arrangement.
Basic maintenance, meaning updates, backups, security patches and uptime monitoring, runs $50 to $150 a month for a small business site. You can also do it yourself if you are comfortable, or leave it entirely, though that is how sites end up hacked or broken. See website maintenance and hosting.
Keep reading
The other pieces of the decision, from choosing a builder to what cheap really means.
How to compare quotes, what questions to ask, and the contract terms worth arguing about before you sign.
Read the guide →When a template is the smart call and when it quietly costs you more than a custom build would have.
Read the guide →What cheap should and should not mean, with a four-way cost comparison over three years.
Read more →Getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI overviews, which increasingly answer before anyone clicks.
Learn about AEO →Tell us a bit about your business and which three pages you want. We’ll come back with a fixed-fee quote in writing, usually within one business day. No pressure, no pitch deck.
No spam. No long-term contracts. Just a conversation.