How much does a website cost in Quebec in 2026? Prices and budget

In Quebec, a website costs between $2,000 and $10,000 for a small business brochure site, between $8,000 and $25,000 for a bilingual corporate site and between $6,000 and $50,000 for an online store, before taxes. Add $300 to $3,000 a year for the domain name, hosting and maintenance. What moves the invoice is not the number of pages: it is the content to produce, how much of the design is made for you and the platform you choose.

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How much a website costs in Quebec, by type of site

The amounts below are before taxes, for a project delivered by a provider: not a template you buy and fill in yourself. The median column is the one to remember: it is the price where most projects of that type land in Quebec. The last column gives what the site will cost each year afterwards.

These ranges come from our survey of Quebec providers and from quotes on our own engagements. No public body publishes data on the price of a website in Quebec: every range you will read elsewhere, ours included, is a market observation. That is why the rest of this article shows where the prices come from, with sources you can check.

You may have read at the BDC that a website costs $10,000 to $30,000. That figure does not contradict our table: the BDC gives it for its own clients, who are mostly established businesses. It matches our corporate site and online store rows. A brochure site for a local service business can cost much less without being sloppy.

What each budget level buys

Five levels, and each one buys something specific. What changes from one level to the next is almost never the number of pages: it is the amount of custom work and the amount of content someone has to produce from scratch.

Under $2,000

A purchased template, set up by you or by a junior freelancer, with your own copy and photos. It is a real segment and there is nothing shameful about it: for a shop that needs an address, opening hours and a form, it is enough. What you will not get: copy written for you, a structure built for search or someone to call when it breaks. Plan for 15 to 30 hours of your own time.

$2,000 to $5,000

The most common level among service businesses in Quebec. A template customized to the company's colours, 5 to 10 pages, a connected form and basic SEO. The content stays yours: if the provider writes your copy at this price, it is generic. That is often the first thing that limits your visibility.

$5,000 to $12,000

A design made for you rather than adapted, 10 to 20 pages, a structure built around what your customers search for, copywriting for part of the pages and analytics in place. This is the first level where the site becomes a tool to attract customers rather than a business card.

$12,000 to $30,000

A corporate site, often bilingual, 20 to 50 pages, with full copywriting, integrations with a CRM (the software that centralizes your customer contacts and sales) or a booking system, then real accessibility work. It is also the level of online stores with a mid-sized catalogue. Project management becomes a real line item, not a token one.

$30,000 and up

This is no longer a website but an application: a configurator, a customer portal, a connection to a management system or a catalogue of several thousand products with pricing rules. At this level, price matters less than the project description: a vague specification costs more than any hourly rate.

Where these prices come from: the wage, then the hourly rate

A website is paid for in hours of work. To know whether a quote is reasonable, you need to know what an hour of each trade is worth in Quebec. Job Bank, the Government of Canada's labour market information service, publishes the hourly wages of each occupation by province.

These amounts are employee wages, not billed rates. Between the two sits what an hour costs the business that bills you. Here is the calculation, with our own assumptions: they are conservative and you can redo them with yours.

This calculation gives a useful benchmark: a freelancer billing $50 an hour earns roughly what a median employee earns once their costs are paid. A rate of $30 an hour for professional work almost always hides something else: a beginner, work done abroad or more hours than planned.

Rates observed in Canada confirm the order of magnitude. According to CIRA, the organization that manages .ca domain names, an independent developer charges $40 to $100 an hour and an agency $75 to $200 an hour. In Quebec, we see $120 to $250 an hour for an agency and $50 to $100 for a freelancer.

Prices elsewhere, brought back to Quebec

Public data on website prices is more plentiful in the United States and France than in Quebec. It works as a point of comparison, provided you convert it and adjust for the size of each market. We converted amounts at the Bank of Canada rate of October 21, 2026: US$1 was worth CA$1.4057 and €1 was worth CA$1.5785.

Three readings follow. First, a Quebec agency rate sits in the same zone as an American agency rate once the currency is converted: CA$150 is nothing unusual in North America. Next, a French freelancer costs roughly what a Quebec freelancer costs. Finally, none of these sources publishes the number of hours in a project: that is the missing data point everywhere, and the next section gives it to you.

One American data point also helps frame the decision. In Clutch's August 2025 survey of 406 American small business owners, 83% had a website. Of those, 45% had hired an agency, 37% their in-house team, 9% a freelancer, and 9% had built it themselves. Hiring an agency is the most common choice, without being the only one.

A real quote, line by line

Everyone publishes hourly rates; almost nobody publishes the number of hours. A rate of $145 an hour tells you nothing until you know whether a home page takes 8 hours or 40.

A 14-page bilingual corporate site, in hours and dollars

Here is a complete quote at $145 an hour. The client's name has been removed; the hours and amounts are those of the project. This project exceeds the $8,000 to $25,000 range given above: it includes everything a quote can contain, from custom design to copywriting for all 14 pages. A simpler project removes rows from the table without changing the hourly rate.

Three items are deliberately left out of the quote, and that is normal: professional translation, billed by the word (about $2,000 for 9,000 words at the rate in OTTIAQ's latest survey); photography; then hosting. A quote that never mentions them has a surprise in store for you.

How many hours each element takes

The benchmarks below apply to careful work. Multiply them by the stated rate to check any quote you receive.

Price by platform, and what it will cost each year

The technical choice made at the start decides half of your bill for the next five years. It is the part of the decision almost no quote explains, because it is paid after signing. The subscription prices below are those the platforms displayed in Canadian dollars in October 2026, before taxes.

Wix or Squarespace

You build it yourself or pay someone to, then you pay a subscription that never stops. In October 2026, Wix displayed $21 to $165 a month depending on the plan, paid yearly. Squarespace displayed $21 to $109 a month paid yearly, or $30 to $139 paid monthly. No technical maintenance on your side, which is a real advantage. Two limits: customization quickly hits its ceiling, and you cannot take the site elsewhere. The content can be recovered; the build cannot.

Shopify

The most widespread online store platform for small businesses. In October 2026, Shopify's Canadian pricing page displayed $44 a month for the Basic plan, $120 for Grow, $465 for Advanced and from $3,400 a month for Shopify Plus. Card fees are added on every sale, from 2.8% plus 30¢ on the Basic plan. Paid apps (customer reviews, subscriptions, translation) often add $50 to $300 a month. Hosting is included in the subscription.

Classic WordPress

The most widespread solution: 58.3% of sites whose platform is known ran on WordPress in October 2026, according to W3Techs. It is also the most expensive to keep running. WordPress is free, but hosting, paid plugins and above all the updates to watch are not. That is where the maintenance plan you will be offered comes from. That plan is not abuse; it is a consequence of the platform.

WordPress rendered static

You keep the WordPress interface for writing, but the published site is a set of fixed files. Hosting drops to almost nothing, the most common attacks have nothing to grab onto and speed goes up. The build costs a little more, and you need a provider who knows the process.

Static site

The site is built in advance and served as files, with a tool like Astro. There is no database to protect and no server to keep up to date. The infrastructure costs a fraction of a WordPress one without being free: at Falia, it is part of the monthly plan for a website managed with AI, which also covers your content changes. This site is built that way.

Custom build

Justified when the site does something no tool on the market does: a product configurator, a customer portal connected to your management system, a particular pricing logic. It is expensive to build and expensive to maintain, because you alone fund its evolution.

Recurring costs, item by item

The BDC gives $20 to $60 a month for hosting and stops there. Here are all the items that come back every year, with the public prices we gathered in October 2026.

The word "maintenance" covers two very different things: technical monitoring, which exists only because the platform requires it, then content changes, which are real work. A plan that does not separate the two bills you for the consequence of a technical choice as if it were a service. A good maintenance offer states how many hours of changes are included per month. A vague one talks about "updates and monitoring" without a number.

Total cost over three and five years

A website is not a purchase; it is an asset to maintain. Comparing it on build price alone is like choosing a car on its sticker price without looking at fuel consumption.

Over three years: two quotes for the same site

The starting gap was $8,000. After three years it is $9,460, but the budget option cost internal time, recurring fixes and degraded performance throughout. The math does not say you should always pay more. It says the build price alone cannot settle the question.

Over five years: five platforms compared

The cheapest site to build is almost never the cheapest to own. Amounts are before taxes, for a small business brochure site of about fifteen pages.

Two readings stand out. First: the static site costs $4,000 more to build than classic WordPress and $5,550 less to own over five years. Second: for a very small need, Wix remains unbeatable, and it should be said even by someone who sells something else.

What Quebec adds to the bill

Three items are specific to Quebec. They are often missing from Canadian or American pricing guides, yet they apply to every business here.

A French site, required by the Charter

The Charter of the French Language requires commercial publications to be written in French, including those published on a website (section 52). The rule has teeth: in March 2026, the Court of Québec fined a business $3,000 for failing to put its site in French despite an order from the Office québécois de la langue française. A bilingual site remains allowed, as long as the French version is at least as complete as the other.

The English version: 30 to 50% of the price, not 100%

Design, development and structure are already paid for. What remains is translation, the layout of each translated page and the linking between the two versions. Translation is billed by the word: the latest survey published by the Ordre des traducteurs, terminologues et interprètes agréés du Québec (OTTIAQ), in 2018, gave a median rate of $0.215 a word. Rates have gone up since: the quotes we see in 2026 sit closer to $0.25 to $0.35 a word. The content of both versions must then stay current together, which doubles the cost of maintaining the content, not the cost of the site.

Law 25: consent and privacy policy

Under Law 25, tools that can identify, locate or profile a visitor cannot be activated by default, according to the Commission d'accès à l'information. In practice, a site that measures its traffic or shows advertising must ask for consent before setting its cookies. It must also publish a privacy policy as soon as it collects personal information, even through a single form. Allow 4 to 12 hours of work depending on complexity: the consent banner, the policy, the analytics settings and the way to request deletion of one's data. Turn down a quote that does not mention it.

Taxes: 14.975% on top of the listed price

Website prices are almost always quoted before taxes. In Quebec, the 5% GST and the 9.975% QST are added, for 14.975% in total. A $12,000 site therefore costs you $13,797 to pay. A business registered for the taxes usually recovers these amounts through input tax credits, but it has to pay them up front. Subscriptions paid to a foreign platform also carry taxes, based on your billing address.

Why two quotes differ by a factor of three

Because they do not describe the same site. In nearly every case we see, the gap comes down to the differences below, and none of them is about margin.

Reading a quote before you sign it

Here is the grid we use when a client asks us to compare proposals received elsewhere. It fits in five questions, and it almost always explains the price gap on its own.

Ownership is the point we most often see cause trouble. A site built on a template licence tied to the agency's account, with a domain name registered in its name, turns into a dependency the moment you want to change providers.

Warning signs of a price that is too low

• No line for copywriting, even though you have no copy ready.
• No line for address migration, even though a site already exists. A rebuilt site without redirects can lose its search rankings overnight.
• No line for analytics or consent, both mandatory in Quebec.
• A fixed price given without seeing your existing content or asking about your integrations.
• Hosting and domain name registered in the provider's name.

A quick calculation also helps: divide the total amount by the stated hourly rate. If the result is under 40 hours for a 10-page site with copywriting, the quote is incomplete or the work will be rushed. If it is over 250 hours for the same site, ask to see the detail.

Before you sign

Setting your website budget in five steps

A budget is built from what the site has to do, not from an amount picked at random. Here is the approach we follow with a client before any quote.

Redesign, lifespan and exit cost

A website does not last forever. The American agency Orbit Media measured website lifespans using the Internet Archive: 2 years and 1 month on average for 50 major marketing brands, 6 years and 4 months for 78 of its own clients' sites. For a small business, a lifespan of four to seven years is realistic: that is the period over which to spread the build cost.

A redesign generally costs 60 to 90% of a new build. Design, copywriting and development are redone in full, and address migration is added, which a new build does not have. The only item truly saved is discovery, because the provider redoing a site already knows its content.

The exit cost is what it will cost you to leave your provider or platform. It is close to zero on a static site or a standard WordPress, because you take the files and the database with you. It is high on a closed platform: you recover your copy and images, never the build. You then have to rebuild the site.

Grants and programs in 2026

Few programs pay for a website in 2026, and several pricing guides still cite closed ones. Here is what we checked in October 2026. Programs change names, criteria and budgets often: always confirm with the organization before building a budget on them.

Two rules apply everywhere: a grant is requested before committing the expense, almost never after. A project shaped to fit a program rather than your need also costs more than the grant brings in.

The design framework, with its three readers, is laid out in designing for three readers. Before a redesign, address migration is covered in our article on website migration.

Frequently asked questions about website costs