The sixty-second answer
Canadian web design quotes average C$800, ranging from about C$440 to C$1,895 for work that is not directly comparable. The quote covers design hours only. Hosting, domain and maintenance recur separately, and legal basics such as a privacy policy should never be a paid add-on.
Where the C$800 number comes from
If you have asked around for a website price in Canada, you have probably met the same figure more than once. Marketplace price guides list the nationwide Canadian average for web design at C$800, with a value tier at roughly C$440 and a premium tier at roughly C$1,895; a related guide entry advertises work starting from C$300 [1]. Those numbers are not wrong, and they are not a conspiracy. They are an arithmetic average of quotes for jobs that have almost nothing in common with each other.
That matters because of who is asking. As of December 2024 there were 1.10 million employer businesses in Canada, and 1.08 million of them — 98.2 per cent — were small businesses [2]. The overwhelming majority of website buyers in this country are owner-operators with a handful of employees, a phone that needs to ring, and no in-house marketing person to interpret a proposal. When that buyer sees C$800, they reasonably assume it is the price of a website. It is closer to the price of a set of design hours, and the difference is where budgets get eaten.
What each tier actually buys
Read the tiers as descriptions of scope, not of quality:
Around C$440. A pre-built template with your business name, your text and a stock photo or two. Turnaround is fast because almost nothing is being decided. This is a perfectly reasonable purchase if your goal is to exist online with correct contact details. What you are not buying is anyone thinking about your specific business.
Around C$800. The same template work, plus some layout customisation, a small number of revision rounds, and someone rewriting your copy so it does not read like a form submission. This is the tier most small businesses land in, and the tier where scope is least clearly defined — which is exactly why it is the average.
Around C$1,895 and up. Custom design decisions, original photography or illustration direction, structured copywriting, and a real revision process. If your business genuinely differentiates on look and feel — a restaurant, a boutique, a wedding venue — this can be money well spent.
Notice what is identical across all three: none of them is inherently faster, more secure, or more findable. Security and findability come from how the site is built and hosted, and those are cheap to do correctly and expensive to retrofit.
The costs quotes leave out
The single most common surprise in a website purchase is not the build price. It is discovering, in month four, that the build price was the smallest number in the transaction. Three recurring costs sit underneath every site:
Hosting. Your site has to live on a server that stays up, holds a valid certificate, and is backed up. This is monthly and permanent.
The domain. Paid to a registrar, renewed annually, and — critically — it should be registered in your name, not your developer's. A domain held in someone else's account is the most common way a small business loses control of its own web presence.
Changes. Prices move, hours change, staff come and go. Ask, before you sign, what a text change costs and how long it takes. A cheap build with expensive edits is not a cheap website.
There is a legal dimension to this too. Under the Competition Act, advertising a price that is not attainable because fixed obligatory charges have been left out is itself treated as a false or misleading representation — the drip-pricing provision at subsection 74.01(1.3), which carves out only charges imposed under an Act of Parliament or a provincial legislature [3]. Tax on top is fine. A mandatory setup fee that appears only at signing is not. That rule protects you as a buyer, and it binds you as a seller the moment you publish your own prices on your own site.
What your site must do at any price
Some obligations do not scale with your budget. They apply to a C$300 template and a C$20,000 custom build identically, and a quote that treats them as premium extras is quietly transferring your risk to you.
If your site has a contact form — and it should — you are collecting personal information. PIPEDA's Schedule 1 requires that the purposes for collection be identified before or at the time of collection (Principle 2), that you have the individual's knowledge and consent (Principle 3), that the information not be used for other purposes without consent (Principle 5), and that your policies be readily available to the people you collect from (Principle 8) [4]. In practice: a short, honest privacy page and a form that says what happens to the message. That is an hour of work, not a product tier.
If you plan to email those contacts afterwards, Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation requires consent before sending commercial electronic messages, and requires each message to carry prescribed identifying and contact information [5]. The place to solve that is the signup form itself, at build time — an unchecked, clearly worded consent box — not a year later when the list is already built on shaky ground.
And accessibility is no longer a niche concern. The Accessible Canada Act names information and communication technologies as one of the areas in which barriers are to be identified, removed and prevented, working toward a Canada without barriers on or before January 1, 2040 [6]. Federal obligations do not reach every corner store today, but the direction is unambiguous, and the practices that satisfy it — real text instead of text baked into images, sufficient contrast, labelled form fields, headings in order — are the same practices that let an AI assistant read and quote your page. Doing it later costs more than doing it now.
The honest comparison
To compare two quotes properly, force them onto the same footing. Ask each one for: the build price and precisely what it includes; the monthly hosting price; who holds the domain; the cost and turnaround of a text change; whether a privacy policy is included; and what happens to your site if you stop paying. The answers will usually spread the two quotes further apart than the headline numbers ever suggested — and occasionally they will reveal that the more expensive quote is the better deal.
Also ask what a year costs, not what the build costs. A C$440 build with $30 monthly hosting and $75 per text change is not cheaper than a C$800 build with $10 hosting and edits included. It only looks cheaper on the day you sign.
Where we sit
We publish our numbers because we would rather be compared than discovered. A maple.website build starts at $50, which covers 20,000 characters of copy, 4 custom images and 2 hours of work. Past that, extra copy is $0.20 per 1,000 characters, extra custom images are $2 each and extra hours are $40 per hour — always quoted before we do the work, never after. Hosting is $10 CAD per month with SSL, a CDN and daily backups, on a domain you own and control. All prices in CAD; HST extra where applicable.
Turnaround is 48 hours from your brief. Photos are not a gate: send them with the brief if you have them, or add them any time afterwards. The site goes live first.
That pricing exists because the expensive part of a small business website was never the code. It was the meetings. We ask you what you want in writing, build it, and show you the result — and if the site needs to grow into booking, email hosting or a storefront later, it grows from the same base rather than starting over.
The right answer to “what should this cost?” is not the lowest number you can find. It is the number where you know exactly what you are getting, what it will cost you again next year, and who owns it. If a quote cannot answer those three questions in writing, the price on it is not really a price.