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How much does a website cost?
Answer four questions and I’ll show you what a website like yours typically costs to build and run, from published prices.
What a website costs
three7.digital/website-cost-calculator
Typical costs
What a small business website costs in 2026
The honest answer is a range, and the build is the smaller part of it. A small-business site costs a few thousand dollars to build and roughly the same again every couple of years to run, before anyone mentions the rebuild. Here are the numbers this calculator uses. They’re typical published prices, not mine.
| Cost | Small | Medium | Large |
|---|---|---|---|
| Build (freelancer) | $3,500$1,500 to $7,000 | $7,500$4,000 to $14,000 | $16,000$8,000 to $30,000 |
| Build (small agency) | $7,500$4,000 to $12,000 | $15,000$8,000 to $30,000 | $28,000$15,000 to $50,000 |
| Keeping it online, a yearHosting and software | $350 | $675 | $1,200 |
| Hosting and upkeep, hired, a yearHosting, software, a maintenance plan and changes | $2,000 | $3,675 | $7,200 |
Prices in CAD. A domain renewal is about $25 a year, whoever builds the site.
Per month, over five years, a typical freelancer-built small site works out to about $225 a month once the build, hosting, software, a maintenance plan and one change a month are added up. An agency-built medium site is about $556 a month. Those figures assume no rebuild inside the five years.
Why it matters
Why the build is the smaller number
A website is sold as a project: you pay for the build, it launches, and it’s finished. Then the costs start. Hosting renews every year. Software needs updating. Someone has to change the team page and the hours. And the standards a site is judged by keep moving: Google’s speed thresholds, accessibility rules, how AI tools read a page.
Most sites don’t keep up with those changes. They drift, and five or so years later someone says the site is out of date. The answer is a rebuild, priced like the first build, and the cycle starts again. That’s why this calculator prices five years, not a launch.
If your site is already a few years old, the website expiry check lists every standard that changed since it was built and prices the catch-up.
Sources
Where these numbers come from
Canadian prices (CAD) · 18 sources
- Build costs. Canadian agencies publish $3,000 to $7,500 for a site of 1 to 5 pages and $7,500 to $20,000 for 6 to 20 pages, and say freelancers typically come in 20 to 40% lower (Shift8, Toronto, April 2026 (opens in a new tab)). Bark’s Canadian price guide (opens in a new tab) puts freelancer small-business sites at $1,500 to $5,000 and agency sites at $3,000 to $10,000. Most quotes leave out copywriting and photos.
- Content and images. Copywriting at $100 to $400 a page (H1Site, Marvel Marketing) for about 5, 15 or 40 pages by size, plus photography at $500 to $2,500 (H1Site).
- Maintenance plans and hourly rates. Published Canadian care plans run from about $50 to $500 a month (Ambrite, May 2026 (opens in a new tab); WP Expert, Ottawa (opens in a new tab); Tiffany Mark, Vancouver (opens in a new tab)). Providers price plans by features, not page count, so matching a plan to your site’s size is my assumption. Freelance web developers bill about $60 to $120 an hour and agencies $75 to $185 (Shift8 (opens in a new tab)). Changes here are priced at $75 an hour, the low end: experienced professionals and agencies usually charge $100 an hour or more.
- Hosting, domains and builder plans. Renewal prices, not first-term discounts, from Canadian Web Hosting, WHC, Bluehost and SiteGround; domain renewals from Cloudflare, Rebel and Namecheap; Squarespace and Shopify annual plans in Canadian dollars. Checked October 2026.
- Moving a site. A Toronto agency guide by Kolonell (September 2026, cited by Growth Boss (opens in a new tab)) prices a redirect plan at $500 to $1,500 and 90 days of monitoring after launch at $500 to $1,300. Artlogic (opens in a new tab) prices a website migration from $2,500. Canadian figures are thin, and both are vendor prices.
- How often a site changes. Nobody publishes this for small businesses. The figures assume 1, 2 or 4 changes a month by size, half an hour each. That’s my assumption.
US prices (USD), used outside Canada · 40 sources
- Build costs. Clutch’s web design pricing guide (opens in a new tab) (September 2026: most projects under $10,000), DesignRush agency pricing (opens in a new tab) (1 to 5 pages $7,000 to $10,000; 15 to 40 pages $15,000 to $30,000), Dribbble (opens in a new tab) (April 2026: freelancer small sites $2,000 to $8,000), Pitchsite (opens in a new tab) (boutique sites up to 8 pages $4,000 to $8,000), Bark US (opens in a new tab) (freelancer small-business sites $1,500 to $5,000, agency $3,000 to $10,000), PMDS in Baltimore (opens in a new tab) (April 2026) and HubSpot (opens in a new tab) (freelancers $2,000 to $15,000). No source splits out freelancers for 26 to 60 pages, so the large freelancer range is the least certain.
- Content and images. Copywriting is left out of almost every build quote. Pitchsite (opens in a new tab) prices it as a $1,500 to $5,000 add-on and OneLittleWeb (opens in a new tab) at $1,000 to $3,000; the large-site range is my estimate.
- Hosting, software and builder plans. Renewal prices, not first-term discounts: Bluehost (opens in a new tab), SiteGround (opens in a new tab), Hostinger (opens in a new tab), DreamHost (opens in a new tab), Namecheap, Kinsta (opens in a new tab), Flywheel (opens in a new tab) and WP Engine for hosting; GeneratePress (opens in a new tab), Divi, Elementor, Gravity Forms (opens in a new tab), WPForms (opens in a new tab), Yoast (opens in a new tab), UpdraftPlus (opens in a new tab) and Wordfence (opens in a new tab) for software licences; Squarespace (opens in a new tab), Wix (opens in a new tab), Shopify (opens in a new tab) and GoDaddy annual builder plans (the Squarespace, Wix and Shopify US prices come from third-party price trackers); Cloudflare (opens in a new tab), Porkbun (opens in a new tab), Namecheap and GoDaddy for .com renewals. Checked October 2026.
- Maintenance plans and hourly rates. Published plans from Websults (opens in a new tab), FatLab (opens in a new tab), Higgens Media (opens in a new tab), C-I Studios (opens in a new tab) and WP Buffs (opens in a new tab) run about $90 to $600 a month, and GoDaddy’s (opens in a new tab) and WebsiteSetup’s (opens in a new tab) guides put small-business plans at $50 to $500. Clutch (opens in a new tab) puts US agency rates at $100 to $149 an hour and Codeable (opens in a new tab) puts freelancers at $50 to $150. Changes here are priced at $100 an hour, the low end: experienced professionals and agencies usually charge $150 an hour or more.
- Moving a site. Beta Tech (opens in a new tab) (October 2026) prices an SEO migration for a site under 100 pages at $1,500 to $3,500: audit, redirect map, staging review and a post-launch check. StartDesigns (opens in a new tab) (May 2026) puts a small redirect map at $300 to $1,000 and basic SEO checks at $500 to $2,000, and PSDtoHTMLNinja (opens in a new tab) puts URL structuring and redirects at $300 to $3,000. All are vendor prices; there’s no neutral benchmark.
- How often a site changes. Nobody publishes this for small businesses. The figures assume 1, 2 or 4 changes a month by size, half an hour each. That’s my assumption.
ThreeSeven prices are from the pricing page: the same numbers in Canadian and US dollars, plus applicable tax. Defaults last reviewed October 2026.
Questions
Questions about website costs.
How much does a small business website cost?
Usually between $1,500 and $30,000 to build in Canada, depending on size and who builds it, plus a few thousand dollars a year to run. Over five years, running it often costs more than building it. The calculator above shows both for your size of site.
How much does it cost to maintain a website each month?
Published Canadian plans for small-business sites run from about $50 to $500 a month, plus hosting and any changes billed by the hour. Maintenance plans usually cover software updates and backups, not content changes or rebuilds. Here’s what my maintenance plan covers.
How much does a website cost per month?
Spread over five years, a typical small-business site built by a freelancer works out to about $225 a month once hosting, maintenance and occasional changes are added. Monthly plans that include the build, like mine, start at $229 a month.
Is it cheaper to rebuild every few years or keep a site maintained?
It depends on how fast your site drifts and what a rebuild costs you. A rebuild every five years means paying for the build again, plus whatever the site lost while it was out of date. Keeping it current costs more each month and nothing in year five.
What counts as a website’s running costs?
Hosting, the domain, paid themes or plugins, a maintenance plan for updates and backups, content changes, and the work of keeping up with new standards. The rebuild is a running cost too. It just arrives all at once.
Why does your calculator show when another route is cheaper?
Because sometimes it is. If you’re comfortable running your own site, or you have a freelancer you trust and need few changes, the project route can cost less. The calculator gives you the typical ranges for each route so you can decide what the difference is worth.
Still have a question? Ask me.
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