Why website quotes in Calgary range from $500 to $9,000

The short version

Ask three Calgary agencies to quote the same site and you can get $900, $4,000 and $11,000 back. None of them is lying. They are quoting different things, and the quote almost never says which. Here is what separates the ranges, in Canadian dollars, for 2026.

Type of site	Typical Calgary range	What you get
Template site (freelancer or DIY builder)	$500 to $1,500	Your text and photos placed into a theme. Little or no SEO.
Small business site, 5 to 7 pages	$2,500 to $4,500	Custom design, mobile-first, on-page SEO, hosting set up.
Business site, up to 15 pages, local SEO built in	$5,500 to $8,000	Copy written for your customers, Google Business Profile, integrations.
Custom site (memberships, portals, multilingual)	$8,900 and up	Real engineering, content strategy, performance monitoring.
Online store, up to 25 products	$4,500 to $6,500	Shopify or WooCommerce, payments, taxes, shipping, product setup.
Larger store with subscriptions and email flows	$7,500 to $12,000	Subscriptions, B2B pricing, Klaviyo, conversion work.
Redesign of a site you already own	$1,500 to $3,500	New look, fixed functionality, security patched.

Our own prices sit inside those ranges and are published on the pricing page: Launch from $2,990, Growth from $5,490, Custom from $8,900, Store Launch from $4,490, Store Growth from $7,490, Revamp & Rescue from $1,490.

What actually moves the price

Four things decide where a quote lands. Everything else is detail.

Page count and structure. A 6-page site for a plumber (home, three services, about, contact) is a different job from a 15-page site with a page per neighbourhood and a page per service. Each page needs a purpose, a search it targets, copy and a design pass.

Custom design versus a theme. A theme is a layout someone else made for a business that is not yours. It is faster and cheaper, and every competitor with the same theme looks the same. Custom design costs more because someone sits down with your business and decides what goes where, and why.

Integrations. Online booking, payments, a CRM, a quote calculator, a members area, a chat widget. Each one is a few hours to a few days of work and testing. This is where “simple” sites quietly become $8,000 sites, and where it pays to decide early what you actually need.

Search. Is SEO part of the build, or a line item added later? On a site built properly, the titles, descriptions, structured data, page speed and internal links are done as the pages are made. Bolting that on afterwards costs more and works worse. The same goes for AEO and GEO, the work that gets a business cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. In 2026 it belongs in the build, not in a phase two that never comes.

What a $2,990 site includes (and what it does not)

Our Launch package is what most Calgary service businesses need: up to 7 pages, custom design with no templates, mobile-first and accessible (WCAG 2.2 AA), on-page SEO and schema on every page, Canadian hosting set up, and 30 days of support after launch.

What it does not include: writing your content from scratch (we optimize what you give us), advanced integrations, or ongoing SEO. If you need those, Growth at $5,490 adds conversion copy written by us, local SEO with your Google Business Profile, AEO and GEO foundations, booking and CRM integrations and 90 days of support.

Why online stores cost more

A brochure site has to look right and load fast. A store has to do that and take money. Payments, provincial taxes, shipping zones and rates, product variants, inventory, order emails, refunds. Every one of those has to work on the first real order, and every one is a place where a rushed build falls over.

That is why our Store Launch starts at $4,490 for up to 25 products with payments, Canadian taxes and shipping configured, and Store Growth at $7,490 adds subscriptions, B2B pricing, Klaviyo email flows and conversion work. For a real example, Canadian Raw went from a one-page site with no store to five times the monthly online revenue on a Shopify store with subscriptions and local delivery zones.

The ongoing costs nobody quotes

Your domain renews every year (around $20). Your site needs hosting, updates, backups and someone watching for security problems. On WordPress that is not optional; an unmaintained site gets hacked, usually within a year.

Our Care Plan is $129 a month for Canadian hosting, WordPress and plugin updates, daily backups, security monitoring and an hour of changes. Care Plan Pro at $229 adds unlimited minor edits and a monthly performance report. If a quote does not mention any of this, ask what happens the day after launch.

Questions to ask before you pay anyone

Ask who owns the domain, the hosting account and the code when the project ends. The answer should be “you”, in writing. Ask how many pages, and whether the copy is written or just placed. Ask whether SEO means titles and descriptions on every page, structured data and page speed, or a plugin that got installed. Ask what the site scores on Google PageSpeed Insights on mobile; below 70 is a problem you will pay to fix later. And ask for two or three sites they built that you can run through PageSpeed yourself. Ours are here, with the scores on the page.

What we would tell a friend

If the website is where your leads come from, spend in the $5,000 to $8,000 range once and have it done properly: custom design, copy written for your customers, local SEO built in, and a care plan behind it. If the website is a business card while the leads come from referrals, a $2,500 to $4,500 site done well is plenty, and it will still rank for your name and your service.

What we would not do is spend $1,200 on a template today and $6,000 on a rebuild in 18 months. We see that sequence every year.