The short answer
A professionally designed and developed small business website in Canada typically runs $5,000 to $25,000. Under $5,000 you are usually buying a template with your logo dropped in. Over $25,000 you are usually buying custom functionality — a booking engine, a portal, a store with real operational complexity — rather than more pages.
That range is wide because "a website" describes two very different purchases. A ten-page site that explains what you do is a content and design problem. A site that takes deposits, checks availability and writes bookings into your operations software is a software problem. They are priced differently because they are different work.
What actually moves the number
Page count matters much less than people expect. The tenth page costs a fraction of the first, because the design system, the components and the content model already exist by then. Quoting per page is a pricing convention, not a reflection of the work.
What moves the number is functionality and integrations. Every system the site has to talk to — a CRM, a payment provider, an inventory system, a scheduling tool — is a piece of work with its own edge cases and its own testing. A site that takes a deposit, holds it, and captures it later on confirmation costs more than a site with a contact form, and it should.
Content is the other quiet driver. If you have copy ready, the build moves fast. If someone has to interview you, write it and get it approved, that is real work and real elapsed time. Most projects that run late run late on content, not code.
The costs nobody quotes you
Platform fees compound. A site on a hosted builder at $50 a month is $1,800 over three years, and that is before the apps and plugins most businesses end up adding. A natively built site hosted on a modern platform typically costs a few dollars a month or nothing at all, because static pages are cheap to serve.
Then there is the cost of changes. If every price update means an email to an agency, a quote and a two-week wait, the real cost of the site is the invoices you have not received yet — plus the changes you quietly stopped requesting because they were not worth the hassle.
Ask two questions before signing anything: who owns the code and the accounts when this is finished, and what does a text change cost me. The answers tell you more about the three-year cost than the quote does.
How to tell if a quote is honest
An honest quote names a scope and a number before you commit, and says plainly what is excluded. A quote that arrives as a range with the real figure to be determined after discovery is not a quote — it is a way to start the work before agreeing the price.
Be suspicious of anyone who quotes without asking what the site has to do. The difference between a brochure site and a transactional one is most of the cost, and it cannot be guessed from a page count.
If what you are pricing is a rebuild of a site you already have rather than a first site, the numbers move differently — see website redesign services for what changes when there is existing traffic to protect.