The most common discovery-call question we get from a Toronto small business owner: “How much is a website going to cost?”

The most common answer they get from agencies is some version of “it depends, let’s set up another meeting.” That answer is technically true and practically useless.

Here is how we price a project, and the variables that move the number.

What you’re actually paying for

A custom website price is mostly a function of three things:

  1. How many distinct page templates need to be designed. A 5-page marketing site has three or four templates (home, about, service, contact). A site with a blog has five or six. A site with a portfolio has seven or eight. Templates take time; pages built from existing templates do not.
  2. Whether anything needs to be interactive. A booking calendar, a quote calculator, a customer login, a search box that actually works. Each of these is a real piece of software, not a graphic.
  3. How much existing content you have. If you hand us 8 pages of polished copy and 30 hero photos, we plug them in. If we’re writing the copy and choosing stock photos, the project doubles in time.

Almost every quote variation we issue is one of these three knobs turning.

The brackets we work in

These are the brackets we quote from for a custom-built site (not a template, not a Wix drag-and-drop) in Toronto in 2026. They match our pricing page.

Bracket A. Marketing site: 5 to 10 pages, no interactive features

  • Static content sites built on Astro or a similar modern framework.
  • Fast on a phone, set up for search, with a contact form.
  • No login, no payments, no booking calendar.
  • Typical scope: home, about, services, portfolio, contact, plus a blog or journal.
  • Range: roughly $3,000 to $10,000, depending on how much custom design it needs and how much of the content is ready.

Bracket B. Site with one working feature

  • A marketing site, plus one of: online booking, online ordering, basic CRM integration, members-only content, a second language.
  • Range: roughly $6,000 to $15,000.

Bracket C. Web application

  • Sites where the whole product is the software: booking platforms, internal tools, dashboards, customer portals, light SaaS.
  • Accounts, payments and a proper database.
  • Range: starts around $15,000 and scales with feature scope. Clients rarely come in under that for anything we’d call an app.

Bracket D. Redesign of an existing site

  • New design, same CMS, same hosting, no new features.
  • Range: $2,000 to $5,000, depending on how much copy survives the rewrite.

If a quote you’re holding looks wildly different from these brackets in either direction, ask the agency to walk you through what’s in scope.

What moves a quote up

Things that legitimately add cost (in roughly decreasing order):

  • Custom design from scratch vs. starting from a polished base. A custom design is 30 to 60% more expensive than a tasteful, customized base.
  • Copy you don’t have. Writing copy is half the project. Owners who arrive with finished copy save weeks.
  • Stock photography vs. a real photo shoot. A half-day commercial photographer in Toronto runs $1,200 to $2,500 and is almost always worth it. Cheaper options exist but tend to look it.
  • Stripe or Square integration with refund handling, partial refunds, subscriptions, etc.
  • Multilingual. Every additional language adds roughly 25 to 40% on copy, design polish, and the translation workflow itself.
  • Client portals or any authenticated area. This is where a project moves from Bracket B to Bracket C.
  • CMS for non-technical editing. Using a headless CMS (Sanity, Storyblok, etc.) adds setup time but pays back if you’ll publish weekly.

Things that should not add cost: “mobile-responsive” (it is the default in 2026), “SEO setup” (fast HTML and good metadata are the SEO setup) and “secure” (HTTPS is free and automatic).

What moves a quote down

Things that lower the price:

  • You already have a clear idea of what you want. Half-day discovery turns into a one-hour kickoff.
  • You hand over polished copy. This is the single biggest cost lever you control.
  • You’re flexible on design. Starting from a strong template-but-customized look saves design weeks.
  • Phase the project. Ship the marketing site this quarter, the booking system next quarter. Two smaller invoices, less risk.

What you should never pay for

  • “Premium hosting” packages over $50/month for a small-business marketing site. Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, and Netlify all have free or under-$25/month tiers that are faster than what most “premium” hosts offer.
  • Monthly retainer for “maintenance” with no defined deliverables. Either the retainer is for a specific block of work (small fixes, content updates, performance monitoring) or it’s not for anything.
  • SEO audits priced separately from the build. A site built correctly already has the SEO foundation. Audits are valuable a year in, not at launch.
  • “Lifetime” hosting fees paid up front. Nothing is lifetime. Pay monthly or annually so you can leave.

Our pricing in one paragraph

Fixed price after a discovery call, billed in two installments (50% at start, 50% at launch). Two weeks of post-launch fixes are included with every fixed-scope project. Ongoing retainers are month-to-month with a fixed block of hours, no annual lock-in. We send a written scope and a fixed price before any code is written, and we’ll tell you up front if your project doesn’t fit our shop.

If you want a number for your project, book a 30-minute call.