What a custom website really costs in Québec

A website for a Québec small business falls into one of four brackets, from $0 to $500 for a builder you set up yourself to $8,000 and up for e-commerce. Almost nobody in this industry publishes prices, so owners either overpay out of uncertainty or pick the cheapest option and pay twice. Below are the brackets, what moves a project between them, and five questions to ask whoever you hire.

For transparency: I run a web studio, and my own rates appear here as one data point. The brackets are my own read of the Québec market, drawn from the competing quotes clients show me and the ones I bid against. I found no independent Québec price survey with a published method, so treat them as a practitioner's estimate rather than survey data. They hold whether or not you ever talk to me.

In Montréal, the brackets hold as-is, but the competition, the bilingual stakes and what a dense market buys more of are different. The Montréal-specific guide covers those differences.

The four brackets

$0 to $500: do it yourself. Wix, Squarespace, Shopify templates. Legitimate when you are testing an idea and revenue does not depend on being found. The real cost is your time, a monthly subscription forever, and a site you do not own and cannot move. If your business lives on Google searches, this bracket usually costs more in lost calls than it saves.

$500 to $3,000: template freelancer. A freelancer adapts a purchased theme with your logo, your colors and your text. Fine for "we exist" pages. What you rarely get: performance work, SEO structure, proper bilingual versions, analytics that mean anything, or anyone who answers in six months. Ask who owns the theme license, because often you cannot take it with you.

$3,000 to $8,000: custom studio work. Designed and built for your business instead of adapted from a theme. In Québec this is the bracket where the essentials become standard:

• real French and English versions, not machine-translated afterthoughts (what Law 96 requires)
• privacy handling that complies with Law 25
• local SEO done properly
• speed on a phone over cellular

My own tiers: the conversion-focused landing site starts at $1,900, below this bracket, because its scope is deliberately short. The self-edit site, from $3,500, sits at the low end of the bracket: it is for when you need to edit content yourself. Starting prices are on my pricing page; options and larger projects are priced after the free audit.

$8,000 and up: e-commerce and web applications. Online ordering, payments, dashboards, customer accounts. Moving parts drive the price, because every payment flow, notification and admin screen is real engineering. My online shops and applications are quoted per project: scope changes everything.

What actually moves the price

• Page count barely matters. A five-page site and a nine-page site are close in price. What matters is how many kinds of pages need designing.
• Bilingual done right adds real work: two content versions, a URL structure per language, hreflang for Google. From the quotes I see, budget roughly 15 to 25 percent over a unilingual site, and be suspicious of anyone who says it is free.
• Self-editing costs at build time. An admin where you update menus and photos yourself means building that admin. It pays back if you actually edit and is wasted money if you never touch it, so be honest about which you are.
• Content is the silent delay. If the studio must write your texts and source photos, that is billable work. Projects that stall usually stall here rather than on code.
• Care after launch covers hosting, security updates and small changes. The plans I see quoted in Québec mostly run $100 to $400 per month depending on what is included (mine comes as a monthly plan, with no commitment). Without a maintenance plan, security updates stop and the site slowly degrades.

The hidden costs of the cheap options

• Builders charge rent forever. On 22 October 2026, Squarespace's website plans ran CA$21 to CA$46 a month billed yearly (CA$109 for its top commerce plan), Wix's US$17 to US$39 for the standard tiers, up to US$159 for Business Elite (list prices recorded on 1 September 2026), and Webflow's US$15 to US$25 per site. If you leave, you rebuild from zero.
• Agency subscriptions (a monthly fee, nothing upfront) usually mean you never own anything, and the exit cost is a full rebuild.
• Slow template sites degrade the mobile experience, and speed is one of the signals Google uses to rank pages.

Set your budget before you contact anyone

1. Estimate what one new customer is worth to you over a year.
2. Count how many new customers per month a working website could realistically bring. Be pessimistic.
3. If a $5,000 site plausibly pays for itself inside a year, the budget question is settled. If it would not, pick a lower bracket or a smaller scope.
4. Pick your bracket, tell studios your budget range up front, and let them design the best scope for it. A studio that has to guess your budget quotes for its guess.

Five questions that protect you

1. Do I own the code, content, domain, and data outright when we are done?
2. What exactly happens if I want to leave you in two years?
3. Can I see mobile speed scores for sites you shipped, not mock-ups?
4. How are the French and English versions structured: separate URLs Google can index?
5. What does the monthly care plan include, and what costs extra?

Send these five questions to every studio on your list, then hire whichever one fits your budget among those that answer all of them plainly. A dodge on question 1 or 2 is a reason to walk away, whatever the quote says.

Sources

Builder pricing pages read on 22 October 2026. Prices change often; check the live page before you budget.

• Squarespace pricing (shown in CAD)
• Wix plans (official page; prices are rendered client-side)
• Wix pricing, recorded 1 September 2026 (US list prices)
• Webflow pricing (in USD)
• Page experience and ranking signals, Google Search Central