Ask what a website costs and you get answers ranging from "free" to "forty thousand dollars", both of which are true and neither of which helps.
Here is the actual breakdown for a small business site, with the numbers we see every week.
The parts you cannot avoid
A domain: $10–$20 a year. A .ca is about seventeen dollars. This is the cheapest line on the list and the only one nobody argues about.
Hosting: $80–$120 a year. Shared hosting is right for the overwhelming majority of small business sites. If somebody is selling you a VPS for a five-page brochure site, they are selling you something you will not use.
An SSL certificate: $0. If anyone quotes you for this, take the whole quote less seriously. Certificates have been free and automatic for years.
Email: $0–$90 a year. Google Workspace is around $9 a month if you want the whole office suite with it.
Running total: under $150 a year for everything except the site itself.
The part where the numbers move
The website. Three honest options:
Do it yourself: $0 plus your weekends. Genuinely viable if you have taste and time. The failure mode is not that it looks bad — it is that it takes four months and never quite gets finished, because it is always the thing you do after the actual work.
Have it built for you: $500–$1,500. A designed, built, launched site for a normal small business. This is where we sit, and it is where most of the market sits when you strip out the agency overhead.
An agency: $5,000–$25,000. Real value if you need custom functionality, integrations, a booking system, or a brand identity built from scratch. Poor value if you need five pages and a contact form, which is what most quotes at this level are actually for.
The costs left off the quote
This is where budgets break.
Content. Somebody has to write the words and take the photographs. If that is not in the quote, it is your job, and it is the single most common reason a site sits unfinished for months. Budget for a photographer if your business is visual — a trade, a restaurant, a salon. It is $300 that changes how the whole site reads.
Changes after launch. Every business needs some. Ask what the hourly rate is before you sign, not when you need a price changed on a Friday.
Ongoing SEO. Optional, easy to overspend on. Be very suspicious of anyone guaranteeing a ranking.
Renewals. The $99 first year that becomes $299 in year two is a real pattern in this industry. Ask for the renewal price in writing.
Where people overspend
Hosting they do not need. A dedicated server for a site with 200 visitors a month.
Plugins and add-ons with monthly fees, each individually reasonable, collectively $80 a month for features nobody uses.
A redesign every two years because the site was never quite right and nobody fixed the actual problem, which was usually the content.
A realistic first year
For a typical small business: $650 to $1,700 all in, including the build. Then $150 to $250 a year to keep it running.
If a quote is wildly outside that range in either direction, ask what specifically justifies it. There may be a good answer. There may not.
