What should a Niagara small business website actually cost?

There's a kind of restaurant where nothing on the menu has a price beside it. Everything is market price, the server smiles, and you find out what dinner cost after you've eaten it. The food might be excellent. You still order carefully all night, and you still feel a bit managed. That's roughly what buying a website is like for most small business owners around here, and it's the main reason so many of them put it off for another year.

Want this handled instead of DIY'd? See pricing and get a fixed-price quote.

So the number goes first. Most small business sites I build start at $1,800, and the biggest thing I sell is $5,500. One-time, not monthly. What follows is the part that matters more than the number, which is what makes the number move.

What actually moves the price

Four things, in rough order of how much weight they carry.

How many pages you need. A four-page site and a twelve-page site are genuinely different amounts of work, and most Niagara businesses need closer to four. Every page has to be written, laid out, checked on a phone, and then kept accurate for years afterward, so pages aren't free even when they look like filler.

Who writes the words. This is the line most owners underestimate, and it's usually the difference between two quotes that otherwise look identical. If you hand a designer finished copy for every page, the build gets cheaper. Almost nobody has finished copy, and nobody should have to write it themselves at ten at night after a full day of running a shop. When I quote, writing is in the price. If a quote you're comparing is suspiciously low, that's the first place to look.

Whether money changes hands on the site. A site that tells people what you do and how to reach you is a small job. A site that takes bookings or payments is a bigger one, because now there's inventory, tax, refunds, failed cards, and a customer emailing you on a Sunday about an order. That's the real jump in price, and it's worth paying for when you're actually selling online. It's worth nothing at all when you aren't.

How many towns and services need their own page. A plumber in Welland who also works Port Colborne and Wainfleet is running three local markets at once, and those want separate pages. One town, one service, one page. That's the cheapest version, and plenty of businesses are exactly that.

Notice what isn't on the list: how good it looks. Design isn't the expensive part of a small website. Writing and structure are.

Why I quote three fixed sizes instead of a custom number

Starter is $1,800, Grow is $3,200, Complete is $5,500. Every one of them is a one-time fee.

Fixed sizing exists because a genuinely custom quote for a small site spends more of your money on quoting than on building. I've made a few hundred of these. The shapes repeat. Pricing them as three sizes means you can see the number on a web page at nine at night without booking anything, decide whether it's in range, and only then talk to me.

Most Niagara businesses only need Starter, and I'll tell you so even when Grow is sitting right there on the same page. If you outgrow it in two years you move up a size, and nothing you paid for the first time gets thrown out.

Side by side, here's what each size includes. Each size includes everything in the one before it.

Red flags in a vague quote

• A quote that won't produce a number until you've sat through two meetings. Call the second meeting what it is: a sales process.
• A monthly fee with no end date and no list of what it buys. Hosting and a domain are small, roughly a phone bill a year. A few hundred a month for "maintenance" on a five-page site is a lease dressed as a service.
• A quote that doesn't say who owns the domain and the hosting account. If your name isn't on both, you're renting your own front door. Ask directly, in writing, before you pay anything.
• "Starting at" with no ceiling and no scope. That's the market-price menu again.
• An SEO retainer attached from day one, before the site exists and before anyone has seen a single search result. There's real search work worth paying for, and it's work you buy after you have something to measure, not before.

Why "it depends" is usually a stall

A drywaller can look at two photos of your basement, ask what you want the ceiling to do, and give you a number before he finishes his coffee. He doesn't know everything yet. He knows enough to be roughly right, and he will tell you what could change it.

A small business website isn't more mysterious than a basement. If somebody can't give you a range after a twenty minute conversation about what you sell and who buys it, either they haven't built many of these, or the vagueness is doing a job for them and not for you.

The cost of that stall isn't the meeting. It's the year you spend not deciding, while somebody down the road with a plain four-page site takes the calls you would have taken.

Tell me what you sell and roughly where, and I'll tell you which of the three sizes actually fits, including the times the honest answer is that you don't need me yet. Call 905.682.4642, or email hello@niagarawebdesigner.com if that's easier.