The short answer: anywhere from $500 to $50,000. The real answer depends on what you need.
Large agencies in Vancouver charge $5,000 to $15,000+ for a standard business website. They have offices, project managers, multiple designers, and overhead that gets passed to you. The process takes 4 to 8 weeks. You'll have discovery meetings, strategy sessions, and revision rounds.
Freelancers charge $1,000 to $5,000. Quality varies wildly. Some are excellent designers moonlighting after their day job. Others are people who watched a WordPress tutorial last month.
Website builders like Wix and Squarespace cost $15 to $40 per month. They're fine if you want something generic. But they come with limitations: slow load times, cookie-cutter templates, poor SEO out of the box, and your site looks like every other Squarespace site in your industry.
At Forge Digital, our builds start at $500. We're a small studio in Vancouver — no account managers, no overhead. You talk directly to the person building your site. Every site is custom designed, mobile-first, and SEO-optimized. We deliver in under a week. And we offer a free mockup before you commit, so you see exactly what you're getting before spending a dollar.
The question isn't really "how much does a website cost?" It's "how much is it costing you to not have a good one?" If your competitor's website makes their phone ring and yours doesn't, the math is simple.