The short answer
In New Brunswick in 2026, a small-business website lands in one of four brackets:
- Template package: $1,500 – $3,000. Your logo and copy placed into a proven theme. Fast, functional, and identical to everyone else who bought the theme.
- Independent freelancer: $2,000 – $8,000. The widest quality range in the market. Screen hard on process and published work.
- Custom studio build: $5,000 – $11,000. Discovery, writing, design, build, and search foundations, usually from a small team or one senior person. The top half of the range is where brand identity work joins the website.
- Agency engagement: $15,000 and up. Process, project managers, and a team — priced accordingly, and often located nowhere near the Maritimes.
Which bracket is right depends on one question: is your website a business card, or is it how customers judge you before they ever talk to you? The first can be templated. The second is worth real money.
What actually drives the price
The pages themselves are the cheapest part. When a quote climbs, this is what's underneath:
- Strategy and discovery. Someone figuring out what your business actually is before designing it. This is the single biggest difference between a site that converts and a pretty brochure.
- Brand work. If you have no identity to build on — or you've outgrown the one you have — that's its own project, whoever does it.
- Writing. Copy that sounds like you and sells is a craft. "Client provides all text" in a quote means the hardest job just became yours.
- Search and AI-search foundations. Semantic structure, speed, structured data, local signals — the work that makes Google and ChatGPT able to find and recommend you.
- Who does the work. A senior person costs more per hour and less per outcome. Cheap quotes usually stay cheap by handing the work to the least experienced person available.
The costs nobody quotes
The sticker price is the visible cost. The expensive ones hide elsewhere: the rebuild two years in when the cheap site can't grow with you, and the customers who searched, found nothing convincing, and called someone else. Your brand takes a quiet discount when your website reads like a photocopy of your competitor's, and you lose weekends fighting a page builder because "you can easily update it yourself" turned out to be aspirational.
Paying twice is the expensive option — and many of the rebuilds I take on started exactly that way: a cheap site that sat invisible for years before its owner called anyone.
My pricing, published
The Growth Grove works flat-rate: we talk, I scope what you need, you get one number before anything starts. Here is the project list; care plans and the Visibility Audit live on the pricing page.
| What you're buying | Price (CAD) | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Starter site — 3 pages, modern build | From $1,500 | 2–3 weeks |
| Custom website — design and build, up to 8 pages | From $5,000 | 4–6 weeks |
| Brand identity on its own | $4,500 – $7,500 | 3–4 weeks |
| Brand and website together — discovery through launch | $6,000 – $11,000 | 6–8 weeks |
| The Visibility Audit — how you show up when people ask AI and search | $795 | 3 weeks |
One person carries the project start to finish. When brand and website ship together the brand rate is discounted in the bundle, which is why the pair costs less than buying both separately.
The full breakdown lives on the pricing page, and the vetting questions worth asking anyone — including me — are in the guide to choosing a web designer in Moncton.
Quick answers
How much should a small business budget for a website in New Brunswick?
For a template-based brochure site, budget $1,500 to $3,000. For a custom site built on real strategy — discovery, writing, search foundations — budget from $5,000 CAD, or $6,000 to $11,000 when brand identity is part of the project. Below $1,500 you're building it yourself, and quotes that land between $3,000 and $5,000 usually turn out to be template packages with a bigger invoice.
Why do website prices vary so much?
Because 'website' describes the deliverable, and the deliverable is the cheapest part. The price difference is everything underneath it: strategy, positioning, writing, custom design, search and AI-search foundations, and who exactly does the work. A template skips all of it — which is exactly right for some businesses and quietly expensive for others.
Is a $1,500 website ever the right call?
Yes. If your business sells itself in person, you need a clean online business card fast, and your story can wait — $1,500 is the right spend. Just make sure it buys a modern build instead of a dated theme; my own starter sites live at exactly that price for exactly that reason. It becomes the wrong call when your website is how customers judge you before they ever talk to you.