What this costs.
Nobody in this market publishes a number, which is why every owner we meet has three quotes with a tenfold spread and no idea why. Here is ours, in writing, before you call.
Website builds start at $5,000. Online stores start at $10,000. Monthly search and advertising work runs in bands you can read below. Everything is quoted as a fixed price in writing before anything begins, and you pay as each phase ships.
That paragraph took eleven seconds to read and it is more pricing information than the six agencies we compete with in this region publish between them, combined. All of them say contact us for a quote.
Website builds
| What you are buying | Range | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Small business site | $5,000 to $15,000 | An established local business where the site is a real lead source |
| Larger custom site | $15,000 to $40,000 | Multiple services and locations, integrations, a lot of written content |
| Online store | $10,000 to $25,000 | A straightforward Shopify build selling to consumers |
| Larger store or replatform | $25,000 to $60,000+ | Subscriptions, B2B pricing, migrations, complex inventory |
Typical build time is a week and a half to three and a half weeks from approved brief to launch.
Four things move the number, roughly in order: how many pages you need, who writes the copy, whether money changes hands on the site, and how many systems it has to talk to. Design complexity moves it less than people expect, because an elaborate-looking page and a restrained one take about the same time to build properly.
Monthly search and advertising
| Work | Band |
|---|---|
| SEO | Under $1,000 / month, $1,000 to $2,500, $2,500 to $5,000, $5,000+ |
| Advertising management | Under $2,500 / month of spend, $2,500 to $10,000, $10,000 to $50,000, $50,000+ |
Monthly work is scoped against what your site actually needs rather than sold as a package of hours. The honest thing to say about the bottom band is that under $1,000 a month there is not enough time in it to do much more than keep a Google Business Profile healthy and publish occasionally, and for some businesses that is genuinely the right spend.
Advertising management is quoted as a flat monthly fee rather than a percentage of your spend. A percentage pays us more when you spend more, which is a strange incentive to hand your agency.
What you are not paying for
No mandatory maintenance retainer to keep your own website online. No licence fees to us. No charge to move your site elsewhere, and no hostage-taking over the domain or the code, which we assign to you on final payment. If you want to know why that last sentence matters, read who actually owns your website.
Why the three quotes you are holding disagree by a factor of ten
They are not quoting the same product. That is the whole answer, and nobody says it out loud because saying it means explaining which product you are.
The $1,800 quote is a template set up for you. It is a real product, it suits a business whose customers come from word of mouth, and it is a rational purchase. What it is not is a smaller version of the quote below it.
The $9,000 quote is a custom build where somebody plans the structure around what people search, writes the copy, and is accountable for whether the thing produces enquiries.
The $40,000 quote is either a much larger project, with integrations and dozens of pages, or it is a $9,000 project sold to a company that looked like it could pay $40,000. Both exist. The way to tell them apart is to ask what specifically costs that much, and listen for whether the answer is a list of things or a feeling.
The question that separates all three faster than any other: who writes the copy, and is it in this price.
What ongoing costs look like, honestly
The build is not the end of the spending and anybody implying otherwise has not been straight with you.
A static site like the ones we build costs roughly $20 a year for the domain, with hosting that is usually free at small scale. A WordPress site runs $200 to $600 a year in hosting plus plugin licences plus somebody to apply the updates, and that last part is the one nobody quotes. A Shopify store is $500 to $1,000 a year before apps, and the apps are where store running costs quietly double.
Then there is whether you want anybody doing anything with the site after launch. Content, search and advertising are separate decisions with separate budgets. You should be able to say no to all three and still have a site that works, and if a proposal makes the site conditional on a retainer, that is worth asking about.
When we say no
We turn down work roughly as often as we take it, and almost always for one of three reasons.
The budget is under $5,000, which means what you need is a template set up properly by somebody competent, usually $1,500 to $3,500, and that is a perfectly rational purchase we are not the right people for.
Your customers come from word of mouth and the site exists so people can check you are real. Spend the money on your Google Business Profile and photographs instead.
Or you want advertising on a site that will not convert the clicks. We will tell you to fix the page first, because paying for traffic that lands somewhere slow and unclear is the most expensive mistake available in this market and no amount of campaign tuning repairs it.
How a quote actually happens
You tell us what the business needs the site to do. We come back with a fixed number, a phase breakdown and a timeline, usually within one business day. If the number works, we start. If it does not, you have lost twenty minutes and gained a published price range you can hold the next three quotes against.
The deeper version of all of this, including what to ask three different agencies so their quotes become comparable, is in what a website costs in Brantford and how to compare three website quotes.
Because quote on request wastes everybody's time. If your budget is $2,000 you should find that out from a web page rather than from two meetings, and if it is $40,000 you should know we are not going to invent work to reach it. Silence sends people to whoever answered.
$5,000. Below that we say no and mean it, because what we do does not compress into a smaller number without becoming a template, and a template is a product somebody else sells better and cheaper than we would.
Fixed, in writing, before anything starts. It changes only if you ask for something that was not in the scope, and then we quote that separately before doing it. We do not bill hourly, because hourly billing pays us for being slow.
As each phase ships rather than up front. You approve the phase, it goes live, you pay for it. If we stall, the invoices stall with us, which is the point of structuring it that way.
We offer monthly work, scoped against what your site actually needs, inside the bands on this page. What we do not do is sell a fixed number of hours or a bundle of deliverables that is the same for every client regardless of what is wrong.
A static build like ours is roughly $20 a year for the domain plus hosting that is often free at small scale. A Shopify store is $500 to $1,000 a year before apps. We do not charge a mandatory maintenance fee to keep your own site online.