Ask three companies what a website costs and you will get three wildly different numbers. One quotes $200, one quotes $20,000, and both are technically telling the truth. The price depends entirely on what you are actually buying. Here is what drives the number for a small business in Kelowna, and what you should expect to pay for work that actually brings in customers.
Why the quotes are all over the map
A website is not one thing. A template you fill in yourself, a designer who customises that template, and someone who hand-codes a site built to rank and convert are three different products at three different prices. Most of the cheap quotes are the first kind, a shared template with your logo dropped in. Most of the expensive ones are agencies with overhead to cover. The real question is not what does a website cost. It is what do I need the website to do.
The DIY route: $0 to $300 a year
Wix, Squarespace, and the rest let you build it yourself for the price of a subscription. For a brand-new side business testing an idea, that can be the right call. The catch is the cost that does not show up on the invoice: your time, a site that looks like a thousand others, and a structure that search engines and AI tools struggle to read. It exists. Whether it gets found is another matter.
The custom route and what it buys
A custom-built site for a small business usually starts around $600 and climbs with the size of the site and the work involved. What you are paying for is not just looks. It is clean code that loads fast on a phone, structured data so Google and AI answers can read your business correctly, local SEO built in from the start, and copy written to answer what your customers actually ask. That is the part that turns a website from an online brochure into something that brings in work.
What actually moves the price
A few things drive the number more than anything else. Number of pages: a five-page site costs less than a fifty-page one. Custom photography: real photos of your work beat stock every time, and shooting them takes time. Functionality: a simple lead-capture site is one thing, online booking or a store is another. And ongoing work: a one-time build is a different number than a site kept current with new content and SEO month to month.
What it is really worth
Here is the honest way to think about it. One new customer from your website often covers the cost of the whole build. A flooring job, a few HVAC calls, one modular building order. If the site brings in work, the price stops being an expense and becomes the cheapest salesperson you have, one that works every hour of every day. A cheap site that never gets found is the expensive option. A site built to be found pays for itself.
Want a real number for your business instead of a range? Tell me what you need the site to do and I will quote it straight, no padding. I hand-build websites for Kelowna and Okanagan businesses, from $600. Book a free thirty-minute call at bryceelliot.com/contact or text 604-817-1069.
