If you have spent any time asking Canadian agencies what a custom small-business website costs, you already know the answer is "it depends." That answer is correct. It is also unhelpful when you are trying to decide whether to budget five thousand dollars or twenty.
This post is a plain breakdown. What we charge, what is in the number, what is not, and what moves the number up or down. Written for a Canadian small-business owner who has already had three quote forms come back vague.
The honest range
For a flat-fee rebuild of a small-business website in Canada, the typical range we see is eight thousand to fifteen thousand dollars CAD. New builds, where there is no existing site or brand to start from, run higher. A complex new build with brand basics, a multi-language site, or custom integrations can land anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five thousand.
That is the whole range. Most projects land in the middle. There is no project we have scoped at three thousand, and no small-business project we have scoped at fifty thousand. The range is real.
What is in the fee
A flat-fee Umber engagement covers all of:
- Free written audit, before any commitment, delivered in five business days.
- Discovery, copy, design, build, and launch.
- For new builds: brand basics (name decisions, logo, voice and type direction).
- URL migration with redirects so existing rankings carry across.
- On-page SEO and schema setup.
- Analytics and call-tracking setup.
- Thirty days of free changes after launch.
If a part of the work is needed but not in the standard scope, it goes on the proposal, with a clear line item, before we start. There is no surprise on the invoice because the invoice matches the proposal exactly.
What is not in the fee
A few things that are commonly assumed to be included but are not:
- Domain registration and email hosting. We help you set them up. The vendor bills you directly, at cost, because we do not mark up third-party services.
- Ongoing hosting after launch. Typically twenty to forty dollars a month for a small-business site. Sometimes free for the first year, depending on platform.
- Ongoing SEO retainers. We do the on-page SEO that comes with the build. We do not sell ongoing SEO retainers because the marginal value is rarely worth the monthly cost for a typical small business.
- Paid ad management. Different specialty.
- Photography and video shoots. Either you have photos already, you take them on a phone, or you hire a photographer. The photos go in the rebuild. The shoot day is its own line item if you want us to coordinate it.
What moves the number up
In rough order of impact:
- Scope of pages and content. A six-page site is materially less work than a thirty-page site.
- Custom integrations. Booking software, dispatch software, payment, a real CMS with multiple author roles. Each integration adds days.
- Migration complexity. A Wix or Squarespace site with twelve pages migrates fast. A WordPress site with three hundred indexed URLs and a content team takes longer.
- Brand work for new builds. A name and logo decision adds two to three weeks of design exploration.
- Multi-language. French and English parallel sites are roughly seventy percent of the cost of doing it once, not double.
What moves the number down
- Existing brand assets you already own (logo, type direction, photos).
- A small site that does not need a CMS.
- A clean migration where the old site is simple and well-organized.
- Decisive ownership. The fastest projects are the ones where the owner gives clear feedback within two business days. The slowest are the ones where feedback waits two weeks because everyone is busy.
How the audit changes the math
Before any commitment, the free audit gives you a written estimate in your range, not a generic number. The audit looks at your current site (if you have one), your traffic and conversion data, your industry, and the work that actually moves the needle for your specific business. The estimate is real. The audit is also free, and it stays useful even if you decide not to work with us.
A note on hourly billing
Some Canadian agencies bill hourly. Hourly is fine for some kinds of work. For a website rebuild with a defined scope, it is the wrong tool, because it transfers all the risk of "the thing took longer than expected" from the vendor to you. We bill flat-fee on every engagement for that reason. The number on the proposal is the number on the invoice. If we underestimated, that is our problem, not yours.
The full pricing page covers this in more detail at /pricing. The comparison page lays out how flat-fee custom work stacks up against Wix, freelancers, and typical agencies.