How much does a website cost in Alberta?

The honest answer is that a business website in Alberta costs somewhere between nothing and fifty thousand dollars, which is useless to you. So here are the actual bands, what sits inside each one, and what pushes a quote from one band into the next.

The realistic bands

$0 to $500: do it yourself. Squarespace, Wix or Shopify with a template. For a two-page site that exists so people can find your phone number, this is genuinely the right answer. Do not pay someone thousands to do what a template does well. The trade-off is that you are renting: stop paying and the site disappears.

$1,500 to $4,000: a freelancer on a template. Usually WordPress with a purchased theme, lightly customised. Fine for a brochure site. The risk is what happens in year two, when the theme needs updating, the plugins conflict, and the person who built it has moved on.

$4,000 to $12,000: a custom-built marketing site. Designed for your business rather than adapted from a template, built on modern tooling, with the technical SEO groundwork actually done. This is the band most established small businesses should be looking at.

$15,000 and up: an application, not a website. Once users log in, data persists, or money changes hands, you are no longer buying a website. You are buying software, and it is priced like software.

What actually drives the price

Page count matters far less than people expect. Ten pages that share one layout cost barely more than five. What genuinely moves a quote:

• Content. If you have no copy and no photos, someone has to create them. This is the single most common reason projects run over, and it is almost always the client side that causes the delay.
• Integrations. A booking system, a payment processor, a CRM sync. Each one is a small project with its own edge cases.
• Bespoke design. A designed-for-you site costs more than a well-chosen template. Sometimes that is worth it. Often, for a local business competing on service rather than brand, it is not.
• Who carries the risk. A fixed price means the developer absorbs the overrun, and they will price that risk in. Hourly means you absorb it. Fixed is usually worth the premium for a first project together.

The questions worth asking before you sign

Whoever you hire, ask these four. The answers tell you more than the quote does.

1. Who owns the code and the accounts? The answer should be you, unambiguously, in your own repositories and your own hosting account. If anything is registered in the agency’s name, you are renting your own business.
2. What does it cost to run per month? A static site on modern hosting is often free to host. A WordPress site needs hosting, backups, and plugin licences. Get the annual number, not the monthly one.
3. What happens when I want to change the text? If the answer involves emailing them and waiting, factor that into the ongoing cost.
4. What is not included? Copywriting, photography, ongoing SEO, and hosting are the four things most commonly assumed by the client and excluded by the quote.

Where the money is usually wasted

In our experience the two biggest wastes are paying for a custom design on a site nobody will remember visually, and paying monthly for “SEO” that amounts to a report nobody reads. Spend the money on speed, on clear copy that answers what customers actually ask, and on making the phone number impossible to miss.

A note on charities and small businesses

If you are a registered charity, a non-profit, or a small owner-operated business, ask about reduced rates. We offer them, and we are not the only ones. The worst outcome is an organisation deciding it cannot afford a website when a conversation would have shown otherwise.

If you want a straight read on what your project would cost, without a sales process attached, get in touch and describe the problem.