Pricing Guide · BC Trades & Service Businesses · 2026

How much does a website cost for a trades business in BC?

The honest answer — including what agencies don't tell you about monthly fees, maintenance, and the 3-year total cost of owning a website you never actually own.

Ravinder Singh The Rainmaker · Surrey, BC Published May 2026 6 min read

Build price

What you pay to launch

$2,000 – $5,000

Standard quote, Lower Mainland agencies, 5–8 section trades site

$0 upfront (DIY)

Looks like savings. Doesn't include your time or the monthly subscription that never ends.

$400 – $1,800

Flat. One-time. Custom-built. Delivered in days. You own the file.

What you get

What's actually built

WordPress site on their hosting stack. Looks good on day one. Starts costing you on day two.

A template with your logo pasted on it. Looks like every other Wix site in the Fraser Valley.

One custom HTML file, built from blank for your business. Designed to look like you, not a template.

Delivery time

From brief to live

3 – 6 weeks. Proposal, discovery call, design rounds, development, QA.

1–2 weeks if you do it yourself. Longer if you have a job to run.

3 – 7 days. Send the brief Monday, preview link by Thursday.

Hosting

Where the site lives

$30 – $150/month

WP Engine starts at $25/mo. Add SSL, backups, CDN — you're at $80 fast.

$23 – $65/month

Business plan required to connect a .ca domain. Prices increase annually.

$0.00/month

Netlify free tier. Global CDN. Unlimited bandwidth. No card required.

Maintenance

Keeping it alive

$50 – $200/month

Plugin updates, security patches, backups. Optional but not really.

Included (limited)

Platform manages updates. You have no control over what changes.

None required

Static HTML never breaks. No plugins, no patches, no patches that break things.

Domain (.ca)

Your web address

~$20/year

Same regardless of platform.

~$20/year

Same regardless of platform.

~$15–20/year

This is your only ongoing cost. Total.

Site gets hacked

43% of all websites are WP

$500 – $3,000 recovery. Data loss, blacklisting, reputation damage. Average small business hack costs weeks of lost leads.

Cannot happen. No login page, no database, no plugins. Zero attack surface.

Plugin update breaks site

Happens to every WP site

$75 – $200 developer call. Or days of lost leads while you figure out which plugin caused it.

Cannot happen. No plugins. Nothing to update. Nothing to break.

Change your phone number

Basic update, once a year

$75 – $150 developer call if you don't have access. Or 30 minutes fighting the WP admin panel.

$75 update call. Or open the file yourself and change it in 30 seconds. Your choice.

Hosting goes down at peak time

Shared hosting risk

Lost calls, lost quotes, lost jobs. Shared WordPress hosting has 99.9% uptime SLA — that's 8.7 hours of downtime per year.

Netlify's CDN has 99.99% uptime. Static files served from 300+ edge locations. Almost never happens.

3-year total cost of ownership — full picture including all fees

WordPress agency (BC)

$8,600+

Build $3,500 avg + hosting $80/mo + maintenance $100/mo × 36 months. Doesn't include emergency calls or hack recovery.

Wix / Squarespace

$1,780+

$0 build + $45/mo × 36 months + annual price increases. You never own anything. Stop paying — site disappears.

The Rainmaker

$845

$800 Standard build + $15/yr domain × 3. Hosting: $0. Maintenance: $0. You own the file. You own it forever.

The cheapest option in year one is not the cheapest option by year three. Static HTML beats every alternative on total cost of ownership — not because it cuts corners, but because it has no moving parts to maintain, no platform to pay, and no lock-in to escape.