How much does a small business website cost in Canada (2026)? Builder vs freelancer vs agency vs $299/month

Short answerCanadian guides published in 2026 put a DIY builder at a few hundred dollars a year, a freelancer at about $1,500 to $5,000 one-time, and an agency at $3,000 to $10,000 or more, with some agencies quoting $8,000 to $25,000. Domain, hosting, booking and upkeep come on top. Our alternative is $299 a month, $0 setup, with booking and texts included.

Ask a few web designers what a small business website costs in Canada and you’ll get a few different answers, because “a website” can mean a one-page template or a custom build with booking. So instead of my own guess, here are the numbers Canadian guides publish, side by side, and what each option leaves out.

How much does a small business website cost in Canada?

The Canadian guides I read on October 18, 2026 put a DIY builder at a few hundred dollars a year, a freelancer at about $1,500 to $5,000 once, and an agency from about $3,000 to $10,000 and up. Vancouver agency SyncSpark quotes “a few hundred dollars a year for a DIY builder, CA$1,500 to CA$5,000 one-time for a freelancer, or CA$3,000 to CA$10,000+ for a custom agency build”, and says most established small businesses that want leads land in the CA$3,000 to CA$6,000 range. Toronto agency Shift8 is higher: it gives $8,000–$25,000 as the range for professional small-business marketing sites, and says most of its own small business projects fall between $12,000 and $35,000. GoDaddy’s Canadian guide puts a brochure site between “$170 for an AI-built site to $5,000 for a bespoke website”.

None of those numbers is the whole cost. The build is the first bill; the domain, hosting, a booking app and someone to keep it all updated come after.

Builder vs freelancer vs agency vs subscription: what does the first year cost?

Here are the four options with first-year costs as the sources publish them. The first three rows lead with SyncSpark’s first-year totals (build plus domain and hosting), because it’s the only one of the three guides that adds them up. The last row is ours.

Over three years the order changes. By SyncSpark’s figures, a freelancer site plus two more years of running costs (“about $20 to $380 a year”) comes to roughly $1,560–$6,140. Three years of our plan is $10,764. If all you need is a few pages, a one-time build is cheaper over time. A subscription only earns its keep if you’d otherwise pay separately for booking, texts and someone to look after it all.

What does a website cost per month in Canada? The ongoing costs

After the build, you keep paying for a few things. The guides disagree on how much, mostly because some count someone’s time for updates and some don’t.

• Domain. CIRA, which runs the .CA registry, says “A .CA domain typically costs between $10 and $20 a year.” It also warns about introductory pricing for the first year, “where typically you commit to a second year at a higher price”.
• Hosting. GoDaddy’s guide says “about $6 to $100 per month, depending on the type of website you have”; SyncSpark says from free to roughly CA$30 a month; Shift8 puts managed WordPress hosting for a small business at $20–$60 a month.
• A booking app. Square Appointments, for example, lists a Free plan for a single location and paid plans at $35 and $85 per month per location, with card processing fees on top.
• Updates and upkeep. Shift8 puts ongoing maintenance at “$50 to $150 per month” and says most Canadian small businesses should budget at least $1,000–$2,500 a year for ongoing costs.
• Missed-call texts. If you want missed calls answered by text, that’s another tool and another subscription. None of the guides above prices it.

So how much should a website cost per year once it’s built? Somewhere between SyncSpark’s $20–$380 for domain and hosting alone and Shift8’s $1,000–$2,500 or more with maintenance, plus whatever booking and texting tools you add.

How does a $299/month website subscription work?

A subscription swaps the one-time build fee for a monthly fee that covers building, hosting and running the site, plus the tools around it. Here’s ours, exactly as it’s priced:

What it costs

$299 CAD a month, $0 setup. Month-to-month; cancel with 30 days’ notice.

What’s included

A website of 1–5 pages (your brand, photos and services), online booking with confirmations and reminders, missed-call text-back on your business number, your client list in one place (imported at launch), your Google Business Profile set up and cleaned up with a review request after every visit, follow-ups for no-shows and unanswered enquiries, and a monthly one-page report.

Usage

Includes 2,000 text segments and 500 voice minutes a month; beyond that, $0.06 per segment and $0.35 per minute.

Launch

Business number set up, carrier registration filed, a video walkthrough and a first-week check-in call, at no charge. Site, booking and client list live in the first week; texts once carriers approve your number, usually 1–2 weeks.

Before you pay

A free demo site within 48 hours of a 15-minute call. No card.

If you leave

Your brand, content, domain and client list are yours and exported on request. Your site and booking link move to Site Keep-Alive ($39/mo, no texts or automations) unless you tell us not to. We email you 7 days before the first charge, and you can switch it off any time.

Hosting is part of it: the site and automations run on our infrastructure and are licensed to you while you’re a client. Add-ons cost extra (an AI receptionist is +$197–297 a month, extra pages $150–300 each, one-time), and the full list is on our pricing page.

When is a one-time build the better buy?

A one-time build is the better buy when you don’t need the system around the site. Be honest with yourself about these:

• You need more than five pages, a store or custom features. A plan built around five pages gets expensive as you add pages, and an online store is a different job.
• You already have booking you like. If your booking app works and you don’t want missed-call texts, a simple site that links to it is all you need.
• Someone will keep it updated. If you or someone on your team will change the hours, prices and photos, most of the upkeep cost in the guides above goes away.
• You’ll keep the same site for years. As the three-year numbers above show, a freelancer build plus hosting comes in well under three years of our plan.

The subscription makes sense when you’d otherwise pay separately for a site, a booking app, a texting tool and someone to keep them connected, and you’d rather have one bill.

Do website prices in Canada include GST/HST?

Ask, because a quote may or may not include tax, and whether you’re charged it at all depends on the vendor. Of the three guides above, only Shift8 mentions tax (it notes that most website services from Canadian providers are subject to GST/HST); SyncSpark and GoDaddy don’t say either way.

In practice, a freelancer under the threshold may not be registered, and then there’s no GST/HST on the invoice; a registered vendor has to charge it. Our $299 is quoted before tax, and today we’re not registered for GST or PST, so we don’t charge either. If we register, we add tax only from the date of registration, with 30 days’ notice, as our terms say.

If you’d like a real number for your own business to compare, we’ll build you a free demo site with your name and services within 48 hours of a 15-minute call, no card needed, and you can read what the website side includes before deciding anything. Or start with a free video audit of the site you have now.