How much does a website cost in Ontario in 2026?

It is the first question everyone asks and the one almost nobody answers straight. So here are the numbers. In September 2026 we read the published prices of 71 web agencies across Ontario — Toronto, Mississauga, Ottawa, Hamilton, London, Kitchener and smaller towns — and wrote each one down. This is what the market actually charges.

The short version

• A one-page or 'starter' site: $800 to $1,500 from most shops. A handful go as low as $299; those are templates with your name typed in.
• A proper multi-page business site: the median published price is about $4,000, with most quotes landing between $2,500 and $6,000.
• Custom work — online ordering, a catalogue with hundreds of products, anything with logins: $6,000 and up, usually quoted rather than listed.
• Monthly care (hosting, updates, small changes): the median is about $98 a month. Hosting alone can be under $20.
• The hourly rate, where anyone publishes one: around $90 to $95.

One detail worth knowing: of the fifty strongest agencies in that list, fifteen publish no prices at all — and those fifteen include nearly every firm with a named team and recognisable clients. Published prices skew toward the cheaper end of the market. The real median is higher than the numbers above.

What moves the price

Two things, mostly. The first is design work: a template with your colours costs a fraction of a layout designed around your business, and you can tell which one you are getting by asking to see the template. The second is what the site has to do. A page that describes your business is one job. A menu that takes orders, a catalogue a buyer can browse and request a quote from, a booking form connected to your calendar — each of those is a system, and systems cost more than pages.

Things that do not move the price as much as people expect: number of pages (templates make extra pages cheap), stock photography, and 'SEO' as a line item, which on a small site is mostly doing the basics properly rather than a separate product.

The cost that is not on the quote

The build price is the smaller number. Over three years, the larger one is everything after: plugin licences, the monthly platform fee, the commission an ordering platform takes on every sale, and the hours someone spends keeping a site alive that was cheap to build and expensive to own. A $49-a-month ordering platform that takes 10% of online sales costs a restaurant doing $10,000 a month online about $12,000 a year — more than a custom site, every year, forever.

The cheapest quote and the cheapest site are usually two different sites.

How to compare quotes properly

• Ask what you own at the end. The code, the domain, the hosting account — in whose name?
• Ask what happens when something breaks after launch, and whether that is included or billed.
• Ask how many revision rounds are included, and what a round means.
• Ask what is not included. A good quote lists it; a vague one leaves it for the invoice.
• Add three years of monthly costs to each quote before you compare them. That is the number that matters.

Our own prices are not on this page — we quote in writing once we know what the site has to do, because the honest answer to 'how much for a website' depends on the answer to 'what does it need to do'. But the ranges above are the market, and any quote that lands far outside them deserves a question about why.