What a Business Website Actually Costs in the GTA

We don't publish a price for a website, and the pricing page says why in about four lines. This is the long version, with the numbers other people's quotes are made of.

Here's the situation anyone getting quotes in the GTA runs into. Three shops, one brief, and the numbers come back at $1,200, $6,500 and $18,000. Nobody explains the gap. The cheap one implies the expensive one is padding. The expensive one implies the cheap one is cutting corners. Both are sometimes telling the truth.

The bands that actually exist

Every published Toronto pricing guide draws these lines in roughly the same place, and after the marketing language is stripped out they agree more than they disagree.

None of those figures include HST, and Ontario adds 13% on Canadian invoices. Agency pricing pages are inconsistent about whether they've mentioned that, which is worth checking on every quote you compare, because the one that quietly excludes tax reads about $800 cheaper on a $6,000 project than it is.

Most GTA small businesses genuinely belong in rows two or three. The problem is that rows two and three look identical in a proposal.

Why the same brief comes back at $1,200 and at $15,000

Three things, and only one of them is design.

Who does the work. Senior agency time in Toronto runs $100 to $185 an hour in 2026. Experienced freelance work runs $60 to $120. Junior work runs $39 to $61. A five-page site is somewhere between 20 and 80 hours of somebody's time depending on how much is being invented rather than reused, and you can produce almost any number in the table above from those two ranges alone without anyone being dishonest.

How much is reused. A $1,500 site is a theme somebody bought, with your colours and your copy poured into it. That isn't an insult. For a business that needs a credible presence, a phone number and a map, it can be exactly the right purchase. It's just a different product from a site laid out around what you actually sell, and the gap shows up later rather than at launch.

What the price includes that you assumed it did. Copywriting is the one that catches almost everyone. Photography is next. Rush timelines add 50% to 100% on their own. Whether the price covers one revision round or four is usually decided by whoever brings it up first.

The quoted price is the smaller half

Every website has two numbers: what it costs to get and what it costs to keep. Almost every conversation is about the first one.

The keeping side, at 2026 Canadian rates, looks roughly like this. Domain, $15 to $30 a year. Hosting, $10 to $50 a month, or $50 to $150 for managed. Maintenance and updates, $75 to $300 a month if somebody else does them. Plugin and theme licences on a WordPress build, $300 to $600 a year before anyone's time. Monthly website packages, which bundle the build into a subscription, commonly run $99 to $399 a month.

That last one deserves its own warning, because the arithmetic is not intuitive. A $150 a month package is $5,400 over three years, which is real custom-build money. If the site stops when the payments stop, and it usually does, you've rented for three years at the price of owning.

Run the same comparison the other way and the picture is less obvious than it looks. A $6,000 build that costs $40 a month to run lands at $7,440 over three years. A $1,200 build on a $180 a month package lands at $7,680. Same money. One of them is an asset you own and can take somewhere else.

I'm not claiming the cheap route is always wrong. I'm claiming the comparison is almost never run, and it takes ten minutes.

The rebuild is the real cost

The expensive part of a cheap website isn't the website. It's that you build a business on it and then have to move.

Two failure modes account for most of it, and both are invisible on launch day. The first is a site that renders in the browser rather than on the server, so crawlers and AI assistants receive an empty page while you see a perfectly good one. The second is structural: catalogue and service filtering that changes the page without changing the URL, which leaves you with one indexable page where you should have had forty.

Neither shows up in a proposal. Both are the difference between a site that compounds and a site you replace in two years, and the replacement is where the real money goes, because a redesign is also the most reliable way to lose the rankings you spent those two years earning.

The platform question underneath all of this has a longer answer in Next.js or WordPress. The short version is that neither one is the expensive choice. Choosing the one that doesn't match how often your content changes is.

Seven questions to ask every quote

These separate proposals faster than comparing the totals does, and they take one email.

1. Who owns the code and the accounts at the end? If the answer isn't "you", the price isn't a purchase price.
2. Is the copy included, or am I writing it? The most common cause of a stalled project.
3. What does month thirteen cost? Hosting, maintenance, licences, and anything on a subscription.
4. Is this a theme or a page builder, and which one? Not a bad answer. An answer you should have before signing rather than after.
5. What happens to my existing URLs? If you have a site already and nobody has mentioned redirects, that's the single most expensive omission on this list.
6. How many revision rounds, and what counts as one?
7. Is HST included? Thirteen percent, and roughly half of published quotes are ambiguous about it.

A shop that answers all seven in a paragraph each is telling you something about how the project will run. So is one that doesn't answer them.

What we do instead of publishing a number

We quote websites rather than pricing them on a page, and the reason is in the table at the top: a five-page brochure site and a fifteen-page site with booking, a client portal and a migration off an old CMS are different projects sharing a word. At 2026 Ontario rates the gap between them is several thousand dollars, so any single figure printed on a page would be wrong for most of the people reading it.

What is published is everything that fits in a box. Sprints are $1,499 for one bounded piece of work with a deadline on it, and monthly work starts at $450. Websites are Custom, quoted with the full scope, the timeline and the number back within 24 hours, from the person who'd do the work.

If you're holding three quotes with a five-figure spread between them right now, send them over. Telling you which one is fairly priced takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing, including in the case where the answer is none of ours.

The build and the search work are the same decision more often than the industry admits, which is why web design and development and AI SEO run as one job here rather than as a site handed to somebody else to fix afterwards.