The four ways a website gets sold
The shapes and the numbers below hold across the rest of Atlantic Canada too. Quotes run a little higher in Halifax and a little lower in Charlottetown and Corner Brook, and the four ways of selling a website are the same everywhere. If you are working outside the province, the Atlantic Canada page covers how the studio handles builds in New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Almost every quote you'll get in this province is one of four shapes. They are not really competing on quality, they are competing on where the risk sits.
Do it yourself
Wix, Squarespace, WordPress with a page builder. Somewhere between fifteen and fifty dollars a month, plus a domain. The dollar cost is genuinely low and the tools are genuinely good now.
The cost is your time, and it is not a one-off. It's the first weekend to get it standing up, then an evening every few months for the rest of the site's life, and one bad afternoon when a plugin update takes the whole thing down before a long weekend. If your hourly rate is worth anything, this is the most expensive option on the list dressed up as the cheapest.
The one-off freelancer build
A few hundred to a couple of thousand, once. You get a site. What you often don't get is a plan for what happens next, because the person who built it has moved on to the next job and answering your email in eight months is unpaid work for them.
This works well when the freelancer is someone you can actually reach, and badly when they can't be. Ask what happens in month seven when you want the hours changed, and listen carefully to the answer.
The agency build
Five to fifteen thousand up front, sometimes more. You are paying for a team: a designer, a developer, a project manager, and the office all three sit in. On a big, complicated project that team is worth every dollar.
On a five-page site for a plumber, you are mostly paying for coordination overhead between people who all have to get paid. And the money leaves your account before you've seen a single lead, which is the part that should give you pause.
The flat build plus a monthly
A flat fee for the build, then a monthly rate that covers the hosting and the ongoing changes. That is what we do, and I'll be plain that this section describes our own model, so read it with that in mind.
The trade-off, honestly: the monthly costs more in total than a one-off build you never touch again, and there is a real number to pay before the site earns anything. What you get for it is that the number is small enough to decide on without a meeting, and that the files are yours from launch rather than rented. If the monthly stops earning its keep you stop paying it and the site is still yours.
The number that matters is three years
A website is not a purchase, it's a subscription with a variable payment schedule. Whichever route you take, you are committing to keeping something alive for years, so compare the routes over years.
Three is the right window. It is long enough that the hosting and the maintenance add up to something real, and short enough that you probably haven't rebuilt yet. Take every quote you're holding and work out the three-year total: build, plus hosting, plus domain, plus a realistic guess at changes, plus the redesign you'll want in year three if the first one was cheap.
Two quotes that are three thousand dollars apart on day one are often within a few hundred dollars of each other by month thirty-six. That's usually the moment the decision gets easy.
A worked example
Say you're a plumber in Bedford. Five pages: home, services, service area, about, contact. Nothing exotic.
DIY: around $30 a month for the platform, plus $25 a year for the domain. Call it $1,150 over three years in cash. Then add your own time: a weekend to build, plus an evening every couple of months. That's the real bill, and only you know what your evenings are worth.
Agency: $6,000 for the build, $30 a month hosting somewhere, and a support retainer or hourly changes. Assume you're disciplined and only ask for four small changes a year at a one-hour minimum. Over three years you're somewhere north of $8,000, and the whole of it left your account in month one.
Build plus monthly: $800 for the build, then $99 a month covering the hosting, the SSL, the backups, and the changes. That's $4,364 over three years, and the $800 half of it buys files you own outright on day one. Stop the monthly and the three-year figure drops to $800 plus whatever hosting you arrange yourself.
These are illustrative numbers for one scenario, not a survey of the market, and the agency figure in particular varies enormously by shop. Do the same arithmetic with the actual quotes in front of you. The exercise matters more than our numbers.
Notice what the comparison does not tell you: which of the three sites will bring in more work. A good $6,000 agency build that converts visitors beats a cheap site that doesn't, at any price. Cost is the easy half of the decision.
Is a website worth it at all?
Sometimes, genuinely, no. If you're a one-van operation booked out four months on word of mouth, a well-filled Google Business Profile and a phone that gets answered will do more for you this year than any website. We tell people that on the call, and it costs us work.
The arithmetic is simple enough to do on the back of an invoice. Take your average job value and your rough close rate on quotes. Work out how many extra jobs a year cover the site's cost. If the site costs $1,988 in the first year and under $1,200 a year after that, two decent jobs cover year one and one covers every year after. That's a low bar. If your average job is $180 and you'd need eleven of them, that's a different conversation, and it should probably be a shorter one.
The other half is what the site prevents. Losing one large quote a year because the customer couldn't find your service area, or because your listing said you were closed, is a real cost that never shows up as a line item anywhere.
$800 to build a five-page site and $99 a month to run it, or $399 a month on the Lead Machine if you're a trade who quotes jobs. Cancel by email and keep your files. The full pricing is here, and if you think a site won't pay for itself in your business, tell us on the call and we'll agree or argue.