What Does Your Website Really Cost?

The cheapest website you can buy is the most expensive one you’ll ever own. It just sends the bill somewhere you can’t see it: to the clients who searched, didn’t find you, and hired the firm on page 1 instead.

In What goes into building your website I walked through the actual work: the competitor research, the keyword plan, the calculators, the audits, the deployment, the search engine registrations. Now the money question. What does all of that cost, what do serious businesses pay for it, and can you afford it?

The two sticker prices, and why both mislead

At one end, Wix and Squarespace advertise $20 to $45 a month. Add the apps, the premium template, the domain, and the weekends you spend fighting the editor, and the real price climbs. And after all that you own a template that thousands of other businesses are also using, on infrastructure you don’t control, with none of the research and content work that decides rankings. The platform is fine software. It’s just not a marketing asset. It’s a flyer with a URL.

At the other end, agency quotes land with no prices published at all. “Contact us for a consultation” usually means the number depends on how you sound on the phone.

What serious players actually pay

I work mostly with legal professionals, so here’s that market, and it transfers to every service business.

Legal website platforms rent sites starting around $150 USD a month at the entry level. The big marketing platforms run reported contracts from $2,000 to $10,000 USD a month, 12-month minimums are standard, and when you cancel, the site usually goes with them. Ontario agencies charge $2,500 to $10,000 CAD for a strategic build, plus care plans that run $100 to $300 a month.

Those numbers aren’t a scandal. Businesses pay them because page 1 pays them back. The problem isn’t the spend. It’s what you get locked into for it.

My prices, published on purpose

Everything is on the pricing page, and that page is the current word on price. Here’s the ladder as of November 2026. A Ready-Built site from the demo shelf is $1,800. An Escape Plan rebuild, for businesses leaving a platform, is $2,500. A Local Business build is $3,500. A Practice Website for lawyers and paralegals is $6,500. Larger custom work, such as client portals and payments, starts at $10,000 and gets a fixed quote. Hosting for any of them is $25 a month or $250 a year. All in Canadian dollars, plus HST.

Here’s what that buys in practice. In summer 2026 I built a Toronto family lawyer a fully custom site: bespoke code, a child support calculator built on the official 2025 Federal Child Support Tables, real client reviews pulled in as trust signals, a 90/100 launch audit, and registration with Google, Bing and Yandex, with 56 pages in Bing’s index inside the first month.

A Practice Website today is $6,500, once, plus hosting. Some firms pay more than that to a marketing platform every single month, and at the end of the year they own nothing.

A year, side by side

Put twelve months on paper and the picture gets sharp.

A DIY builder at $45 a month is about $540 for the year, plus your weekends, and none of the research or publishing that produces rankings. An entry-level rented site at $150 USD a month is roughly $2,500 CAD for the year, and the site was never yours. A mid-tier marketing platform at a reported $2,000 USD a month is over $33,000 CAD in year one, on a 12-month minimum, for an asset you hand back when you leave.

My Local Business build plus a year of hosting is $3,750 plus HST in year one, at the $250 annual hosting rate. Year two drops to $250. Ownership of the website deliverables transfers to you on full payment, subject to pre-existing and third-party licences, and your domain is registered to you.

Your code is not a hostage

On full payment you own your website deliverables, and your domain is registered in your name. My pre-existing tools and any third-party components stay under their own licences.

Try this tonight: look up the WHOIS record on your own domain. If your web provider is listed as the registrant, you don’t own your address on the internet. You rent it, and the rent is whatever they say it is when you try to leave.

With my builds, the domain is registered to you, you can obtain a downloadable ZIP of your website code, and the contract is month to month. Cancellation timing and any hands-on migration help follow your service agreement. No 12-month minimum and no proprietary platform. I priced it this way on purpose: I want clients who stay because the site works, not because the door is locked.

What the monthly actually buys

Hosting is $25 a month or $250 a year. It covers the server, SSL, security patching and nightly off-site backups for sites hosted with us. It’s separate from marketing, and you can say no to everything below it.

Site Care adds $95 a month for up to one hour of small content edits and a monthly plain-English report.

Rankings are earned after launch, and regular publishing is the biggest lever I know of. Marketing plans start at $1,195 a month for two articles, six standard social posts, one premium social creative and weekly SEO reporting. A single article with three branded social posts is $575. Each article is written the way I described in the last piece: shaped for search engines and for AI assistants, question-first headings, answers machines can quote. The social posts put the work in front of people who weren’t searching yet.

That’s the difference between a site that launched and a site that climbs, and you buy only the lines you want.

Can you afford it? Can you afford not to?

Run your own math. For a family lawyer, a single new retained client covers the entire build. For most service businesses, two or three jobs do it. The build is a one-time cost measured against clients who arrive for years.

Now run the other math. If your site isn’t ranking, the clients you’re losing don’t email you to say so. They hire whoever they found. That cost never shows up on an invoice, which is why cheap sites feel affordable right up until you count what they didn’t bring in.

You get what you pay for. The trick is paying for the right things: the research, the content, the tools, and the monthly publishing that moves rankings, instead of a locked platform’s logo on your invoice.

The prices are published. If you want to know exactly where your current site stands before spending a dollar, request a free audit. I’ll grade it out of 100 and show you what page 1 is doing that you’re not. No charge, and it’s yours either way.

Common questions

How much does a small business website cost in Ontario?

At Exhibit A Media, builds run from $1,800 to $6,500 as of November 2026 and larger custom work starts at $10,000, paid once, plus HST, hosting and any ongoing content work. DIY platforms advertise $20 to $45 a month but climb quickly with apps and transaction fees. Full-service marketing platforms run into the thousands monthly and you own nothing at the end.

Is Wix or Squarespace actually cheaper than a custom website?

Over one year, usually yes. Over three to five, usually not, once you add apps, transaction fees and the annual increases. And the comparison misses the real cost: on a platform you are renting, so the day you leave you start again from nothing, with none of the work transferring.

What should a monthly website fee actually include?

Ask for an itemized list. Hosting should cover the server, certificate renewal and security patching. Small edits and reporting are reasonable extras, as long as each one has its own stated price. If you can’t tell what a monthly fee buys, ask before you sign, because you may be paying for things you don’t need.

Do I own my website code?

With a custom build you should own the finished website, your content and your domain on full payment, subject to any pre-existing and third-party licences. On a hosted platform you own your content and nothing else, because the site only exists inside their system. Ask the question before you sign, not when you want to leave.

Can a small business afford a custom website?

Work out what one client is worth over the life of the relationship, then ask how many the site needs to bring in to pay for itself. For most service businesses the answer is one or two. The harder question is what the invisible site is already costing you in clients who never called.