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, but here’s the ladder. Ready-Built sites from the demo shelf are $1,495 plus $99 a month. A Local Business build is $1,995 plus $149. An Escape Plan rebuild, for businesses leaving a platform that owns their site, is $1,500 plus $149. A Legal Practice build is $3,500 plus $249. Fully custom work starts at $7,500 plus $399. All plus HST, all month to month.

Here’s what that buys in practice. This summer I built a Toronto family lawyer a fully custom site for under $3,000 all-in: 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.

Under three thousand dollars, once. 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 package, build plus twelve months of the care plan, is $3,783 plus HST in year one. Year two drops to just the monthly. The site, the code, the domain and every article published along the way stay yours in both years, and in every year after.

Your code is not a hostage

You own the code. You own the server. You own the domain.

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, the code is delivered to you, and the agreement is month to month. Leave whenever you want and take everything with you. No 12-month minimum, no proprietary platform, no exit fee. 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

The care plan is not a parking fee. Rankings are earned after launch, and the monthly is the engine that earns them.

Every month: your edits handled, your Google Business Profile kept current, and a visibility report showing where you rank and what changed, so you never have to take my word for it.

And articles. Regular publishing is the single biggest lever after launch. 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. Then each one goes out to Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram, which puts the content in front of people who weren’t searching yet and sends signals back to the site. One article, five surfaces, every month, compounding.

That’s the difference between a site that launched and a site that climbs.

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?

A custom build runs roughly $1,495 to $7,500 depending on scope, paid once, plus 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?

Hosting on infrastructure that is monitored and backed up, security patching, certificate renewal, small content edits, and a plain-English report on how the site is performing. If a monthly fee buys only the right to keep your site online, you are paying rent on something you should own.

Do I own my website code?

With a custom build you should own all of it: code, content, domain and hosting account, with nothing holding it hostage. 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.