How much should a small-business website cost in Canada?

Start with the job the website has to do

A small-business website usually has one main responsibility: make the business easy to understand and make the next step obvious. That next step may be a call, quote request, booking, visit or purchase.

Pricing should rise when the scope rises: more pages, custom integrations, booking, advanced forms, e-commerce, ongoing SEO and frequent content changes all create real work.

Compare the full first-year cost

An upfront quote can look simple until hosting, domain registration, maintenance, updates and support are added separately. A subscription can look more expensive monthly while including several of those costs.

Put every option into the same twelve-month view before comparing them.

• Design or setup fee
• Domain
• Hosting and SSL
• Content changes
• Technical maintenance
• Forms or booking
• Support
• Any third-party software

A cheap website is expensive if nobody owns the upkeep

The biggest hidden cost is often responsibility. If nobody is accountable for keeping hours, services, forms and contact information current, the website slowly becomes less trustworthy.

For many small businesses, a managed model is valuable because the website remains somebody's job after launch.

What Loonie Sites is trying to simplify

Loonie Sites bundles design, a standard domain, hosting, SSL, maintenance and plan support into the website subscription. The Starter plan is CAD $36.90 monthly, or CAD $365 annually - about $1 per day on annual billing.

Premium or aftermarket domains, third-party software and work outside the selected plan remain separate so the base price stays predictable.