What a custom website really costs in Québec

Almost nobody in this industry publishes prices. The result: business owners either overpay out of uncertainty or pick the cheapest option and pay twice. This guide gives you the real brackets for the Québec market, what moves a project between them, and the questions that protect you — whoever you end up hiring.

For transparency: I run a web studio, and my own rates are in here as one data point. The brackets hold whether or not you ever talk to me.

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: your logo, your colors, 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 — 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), Law 25 compliant privacy handling, local SEO done properly, and speed on a phone over cellular. My own tiers sit here: $3–5k for a conversion-focused landing site, $5–8k when you need to edit content yourself.

$8,000 and up — e-commerce and web applications. Online ordering, payments, dashboards, customer accounts. The price is driven by moving parts: every payment flow, notification, and admin screen is real engineering. My e-commerce tier runs $8–14k; complex applications go well beyond.

What actually moves the price

• Page count barely matters. A five-page site and a nine-page site are close. What matters is how many kinds of pages need designing.
• Bilingual done right adds real work. Two content versions, URL structure per language, hreflang for Google. Budget 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; it is wasted money if you never touch it. 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, not on code.
• Care after launch. Hosting, security updates, small changes. Typical Québec range: $100 to $400 per month depending on what is included (mine run $150 to $395). A site with zero maintenance plan is a site that slowly breaks.

The hidden costs of the cheap options

Builders charge $20 to $50 per month forever and hold your site hostage — leave, and you rebuild from zero. Agency subscriptions ("$99/month, no upfront") usually mean you never own anything and the exit cost is a full rebuild. Slow template sites bleed Google rankings, and every lost ranking is lost calls you never see. Cheap is a price you keep paying.

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, it is not an expense — it is the cheapest employee you will ever hire.
4. Pick your bracket, tell studios your budget range up front, and let them design the best scope for it. Hiding your budget does not get you a better price; it gets you a 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 is the French/English version structured — separate URLs Google can index?
5. What does the monthly care plan include, and what costs extra?

Any studio that answers those five without flinching — hire whoever fits your budget. The ones who dodge are the expensive ones, whatever their price.