July 21, 2026 · 10 min read
How much does a website cost? If you ask five agencies, you'll get five ranges and a lot of "it depends." Both things are true — but "it depends" is a useless answer when you're trying to set a budget. So here are the real numbers we quote at Nova, a Montreal web development agency that builds custom websites for Canadian and American businesses, along with an honest breakdown of what pushes a project toward the low or high end of each range.
A focused 5–10 page custom brand site runs $8,000–$18,000 CAD. Larger marketing sites land $20,000–$40,000, and custom e-commerce runs $25,000–$80,000+. DIY builders cost far less in cash and far more in your time — and for some businesses, that's still the right call. And if you process $10,000+/month on cards, there's a route where the website can be free.
One thing before the details: this guide is about custom-built websites — designed and developed for your business, owned outright by you. If your budget is a few hundred dollars, a DIY builder is the right call and we say so further down. No hard feelings.
These are the actual ranges we quote today, in Canadian dollars:
| Project type | Typical range (CAD) | Typical timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Focused brand or marketing site (5–10 pages) | $8,000 – $18,000 | 4–6 weeks |
| Larger marketing site (multiple templates, content migration, animations) | $20,000 – $40,000 | 6–8 weeks |
| Custom e-commerce store | $25,000 – $80,000+ | 8–12 weeks |
There's a quiet advantage hiding in that table: we bill in Canadian dollars. With the exchange rate where it has sat for the past several years, a CAD quote typically translates into meaningfully fewer US dollars — you're buying agency-grade work at a discount your local market can't match.
If a quote you've received sits far outside these ranges in either direction, that's worth interrogating. Far below usually means a template with your logo on it. Far above should come with a very specific explanation of where the extra complexity lives.
Two websites with the same page count can legitimately differ in price by 3x. The factors that move the number:
DIY website builders run on monthly subscriptions — commonly somewhere between $15 and $60 a month depending on plan and platform, before apps and transaction fees. The real cost is your time and a ceiling on what the site can become. For a brand-new business validating an idea, that trade is often correct.
Freelancers span an enormous range — from a few hundred dollars to well into five figures. You can get excellent work this way. The variance isn't talent, it's process: one person handles design, development, project management, and QA, so timelines and outcomes depend entirely on that one person's bandwidth and discipline.
Agencies cost more because you're paying for a team and a process — designer and developer working in parallel, someone accountable for the schedule, structured QA before launch. Whether that premium is worth it depends on how much a delayed or underperforming site would cost your business. If the website is how customers find and judge you, it usually is.
We're based in Montreal, and a lot of the businesses that ask us "how much does a website cost" are asking in a specifically Quebec context. Two things genuinely change the scope calculation here:
Beyond the legal layer, Montreal agency pricing is competitive with the rest of Canada, and because everything is billed in CAD, Canadian businesses aren't absorbing exchange-rate pain — and US businesses hiring here get the inverse benefit described above.
Whatever you build, budget for the recurring layer around it:
The recurring layer is the strongest financial argument for custom work: a custom site has no platform fees and no plugin stack renting you basic functionality. In our experience most clients break even on a custom build within 18–24 months compared with what they were paying in subscription and plugin fees — after that, the difference is pure savings on top of a faster site you fully own.
Here's the part most cost guides can't offer. Nova is also a payments company — Nova Pay — and for one specific kind of business, the honest answer to "how much does a website cost" can be zero.
For businesses that switch their card processing to a Nova Pay–supported stack, we run a bundle offer that packages three things:
The fit test is simple: a Canadian or US business in good standing, processing roughly $10,000+ per month on cards, and open to switching processors. If that's you, the question flips from "what does a website cost" to "what is my processing already costing me" — and answering it starts with a free 48-hour statement audit. If you just want to understand the processing side on its own terms, our card payments page breaks down exactly how the rates work.
Not processing that kind of volume? No problem — the standard fixed-scope route below is how most of our clients build.
Our process is designed to remove the two things business owners hate most about web projects: open-ended billing and long silences.
A range is not a quote. Describe the project, and you'll have a written number in 24 hours.
You can read exactly what's included in a build on our custom website development page, or judge the work directly by browsing recent projects we've shipped. And if what you actually need is closer to software than a website — dashboards, portals, internal tools — that's a different conversation about custom web applications, with its own economics.
A DIY builder with a stock template, honestly. If your budget is under a few thousand dollars, that's the right answer and no agency should tell you otherwise. The move to custom makes sense when the website is doing real commercial work — generating leads, closing sales, carrying your credibility — and the gap between "fine" and "excellent" starts costing you money.
Because different work is being done. A template purchase is a design decision someone else already made, shared with every other buyer. A custom build is design, development, performance engineering, and QA done for your business specifically — and you own the result outright, with no platform deciding what you're allowed to change.
Through the Nova Pay bundle, yes — for most merchants who qualify. The website credit is up to $12,000, applied directly against the project, and many small-business builds land at or under that number. The exchange is switching your card processing to a Nova Pay–supported stack; the build itself, and full ownership of it, is yours either way.
Ranges are ranges — your project has specifics. That's why we do fixed-scope quotes instead of asking you to trust a blog post: describe the project and you'll have a written number in 24 hours, which either fits your budget or saves us both a meeting.
Yes — our process is remote-first (weekly demos happen on a live staging link, not in a boardroom), and we build for clients across Canada and the United States. US clients get the CAD billing advantage; Quebec clients get a team that already builds for Loi 25 and Loi 96 by default.
Describe what you're trying to build and we'll send back a fixed-scope, fixed-price quote within 24 hours — no sales pressure, no commitment. Processing $10k+/month on cards? Ask about the bundle, and the website may cost you nothing at all.
Get a fixed-scope quote See the bundle offer