What should you budget for a website?
Six questions, and you get a realistic range for the build plus a separate figure for what it costs to keep running. Built from published Canadian rates, not from what we would like to charge.
About this estimator
- Free, no email required
- Shows its working and its assumptions
- Nothing leaves your browser
- Updated 2026-08-24
The two numbers are separated on purpose. A build is a one-time cost you can plan for. Hosting, maintenance, domain and email are a monthly bill that continues for as long as the site exists, and that is the part people forget until the first renewal notice arrives.
This is a budget band, not a project plan. It will not give you a timeline, a sitemap or a specification, because those come from a conversation about your business rather than from six radio buttons.
Your estimate
One-time build
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Running it, per month
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What is behind the number
Estimates in Canadian dollars before tax, for comparing quotes and spotting a gap. A real number comes from someone walking the building.
Where these numbers come from
The ranges are built from three published 2026 Canadian web design pricing guides that broadly agree with each other, cross-checked against each other rather than taken from one source. They describe the market, not a Redsilicon price list, and our own quote for your job may land anywhere inside or outside them once somebody has looked at what you actually have.
Three things in the model are our own reasoning rather than sourced, and it is worth knowing which. No published source separates a redesign from a new build, so the reductions applied to a refresh, a redesign and a rebuild off a locked platform are our estimate of how much of the work is genuinely reusable. Email authentication has no comparable in web design pricing because it is an email problem rather than a website one. And the step-up by product count on a store is ours: the sources give a single wide e-commerce band.
The two questions that move the number most
Who is writing it. The most common reason a website project stalls for three months is that nobody wrote the words. If that is going to be you, block out the time before the project starts. If it is not, price it in from the beginning rather than discovering it at week four.
Whether you can get your content out. A redesign that keeps your existing structure and copy costs meaningfully less than starting over. A rebuild off a builder platform that will not export properly costs almost as much as new, because somebody is moving it by hand. Check what your current platform lets you take with you before you budget.
Want a real number instead of a range?
An estimate is enough to decide whether to start. A quote needs somebody to look at the building. Ours are fixed scope and fixed price, agreed before any work begins.
Before you call
Why is the range so wide?
Because it is honest. The same page count can differ threefold depending on how much design work it needs, how much of your content is ready, and what has to be migrated. A narrow range at this stage would be a guess dressed up as a quote.
Does this include hosting?
The monthly figure does, if you tick it. Hosting is the item people leave out of a website budget and then meet again every month for five years, which is why it is a separate number here rather than folded into the build.
Can we do it in phases?
Usually the sensible answer above a certain size. A first phase that gets a working site live, then the extras. It gets you earning sooner and it lets you stop if priorities change.
Do you match these prices?
We quote fixed scope and fixed price once we have seen what you have. Sometimes that lands below the market range, sometimes inside it. What we will not do is quote a number before understanding the job and then discover the rest later.