What a contractor website costs in BC, and what each price actually buys
Four real price bands, from building it yourself with an AI tool to agency retainers. What each one buys, what it does not, and who each is genuinely right for. Including the cases where the cheapest option is the correct call.
You have probably already asked three different people what a website should cost and gotten three answers that do not line up. One quote landed low enough to seem too good to be true. Another was ten times higher, from an agency that talked strategy before showing you a single design. None of them explained why the gap is so wide, because nobody publishes that part. So you are left guessing whether the cheap one is a trap or the expensive one is a waste, with no way to tell from the number alone.
The number alone will not tell you. What tells you is what sits behind it. Below are the four price bands that actually exist for a contractor website in BC right now, what each one buys, what it leaves out, and who each is the right call for. These are market ranges pulled from what shops across BC actually charge, not an OrveTech price list; the only number in this post that is ours is the CA$4,500 floor on the Growth Website in tier two. The cheapest band is building it yourself with an AI tool, and it gets the same honest treatment as the rest. If you finish this and that option, or the $600 one, is genuinely right for your business, that is a fine outcome and this post did its job.
Tier zero: free, plus your own hours
This band did not meaningfully exist two years ago. AI tools will now build you a website. You describe the business in plain language, the tool produces the pages, and you can have something live the same afternoon. The tool itself is free or roughly $20 to $40 a month, a domain is about $20 a year, and hosting a site this size costs nothing at the traffic a trade business sees.
Worth being straight about one thing before the caveats: the output is often better looking than what the $500 to $800 band produces. Anyone who tells you otherwise is protecting their own quote.
What it buys: a site that is genuinely yours, on your own domain, that you can change yourself at midnight without asking anyone or waiting on an invoice.
What it does not buy: everything about a website that is not typing. Three things in particular.
It will not tell you what to say. The tool writes whatever you ask it for, confidently, including the wrong thing. It will not mention that your home page leads with the service you enjoy doing rather than the one people actually search for, or that the word you use for your trade is not the word your customers type into Google.
It does not deal with the accounts around the site. Registering a domain, pointing DNS at your host, verifying your Google Business Profile, and getting analytics to record properly are each an evening of unfamiliar admin the first time through, and not one of them is the part the AI does for you.
And nobody notices when it breaks. Quote forms fail quietly, which is the whole problem with them: the page still loads, the form still appears to submit, and the messages simply stop arriving. With no one monitoring it, you find out from a customer who mentions they tried to reach you three weeks ago. Or you never find out at all.
The real cost in this tier is not money, it is finishing. Getting live is a weekend, and then several evenings after that fixing the parts that are not quite right. Plenty of people do exactly that and end up with something good. The more common outcome is a site that is nearly finished, never launched, and still sitting in an open browser tab in March.
Who this is right for: more people than most web builders will admit in writing. If you enjoy this sort of thing, have the evenings free, and are the kind of person who finishes what they start, this tier is probably the correct answer and you can stop reading here. It is also a genuinely good way to work out what you want before paying anyone, because a rough version you built yourself is a far better brief than a blank page.
Who it is not right for, and this is the honest part: if the reason you do not have a website yet is not that it cost too much but that you never got around to it, nothing in this tier changes that. These tools removed the typing. The typing was never what stopped you.
Tier one: roughly $500–800
This band is template work, usually built fast and often outsourced overseas. You pick a layout, someone drops your logo and phone number into it, and a few days later you have a live page.
What it buys: a page that exists. That is worth more than it sounds, because a business with zero web presence is invisible to anyone searching Google, and this fixes that specific problem for not much money.
What it does not buy: booking of any kind, a build that reflects how your trade actually works, revisions once it is handed off, or clarity about who owns the domain and the hosting account. That last part matters more than people expect. If the person who built it also holds the domain, walking away later can mean losing the address entirely, not just the design.
One thing about this band has changed, and it is worth knowing before you pay for it. What the money buys you over tier zero is no longer a better looking page. It is that somebody else does the work. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to pay for if you have no interest in doing it yourself, but be clear with yourself that delegation is what you are buying, not quality.
Who this is right for: someone who needs a page to point a Google Business Profile at, genuinely nothing more, and who would rather hand it off than spend a weekend on it. If your jobs come from referrals and repeat customers, and the website’s only function is to look legitimate when someone checks before calling, this tier does that job. Do not let anyone talk you into more than you need here.
Tier two: roughly $2,500–6,000
This is the range for independent builders and small shops who scope a site around your actual business instead of dropping you into a template. OrveTech’s Growth Website starts at CA$4,500 and sits inside this band.
What it buys: a build shaped around your services and area, mobile-first because most of your traffic is someone on a phone, a booking or quote path that actually works instead of a form that waits for you to notice it, and one person who knows the build and answers when you call. At the better end of this band it also buys the words. Somebody sits down with you, works out what each page should lead with, and writes it. That is the piece tier zero cannot hand you, and it is worth checking whether a quote in this range includes it or leaves you staring at a blank page.
What it does not buy: ongoing content creation, ad management, or a large number of pages without the price climbing. This tier covers a focused site, not an ongoing marketing department.
Who this is right for: an operator whose phone, or whose inbox, is the actual bottleneck. If leads are drying up on the page before they ever reach you, meaning people find the site and then quietly leave without calling or booking, that is what this tier is built to fix. It is not right for someone who needs five people producing content every week. That is tier three.
Tier three: $10,000 and up
This is agency territory. What it buys is a team rather than one builder: strategy work, content produced on an ongoing schedule, and campaigns that get actively managed and adjusted month to month rather than built once and left alone.
Who this is right for: a business with enough volume, and enough marketing budget relative to that volume, to make an ongoing team worth the retainer. Most single-truck operations and small crews are not there yet, and there is nothing wrong with that. It just means this tier is ahead of where the business currently sits, not a better version of the same thing you would buy anyway once you can afford it.
What actually moves the number, inside any tier
Once you know which tier fits, the exact price inside it comes down to a handful of specifics, and asking about these is a better use of a call than asking for a number up front.
Page count matters more than people assume. A home page, an about page, and a contact page are one job. Add four service pages and a page for each city you cover, and you have doubled the build.
Whether booking has to talk to tools you already use changes the scope. A standalone booking form is simple. A booking flow that has to sync with a scheduling app or a CRM you already run your business on is a different kind of work.
Who writes the content changes the price both ways. If you hand over rough notes and photos and someone else turns that into finished copy, that is more work than if you supply polished text ready to drop in.
Whether you have usable photos of real jobs matters more than it should. Stock photography looks like every other trade site. Real photos of your own work take time to source and prepare, but they are what actually makes a site look like yours instead of a template.
And how many trades or service areas need their own page multiplies everything above it. A general contractor who does three distinct types of work needs three pages written for three different searches, not one page trying to cover all of it at once.
How to compare quotes that do not line up
If you take nothing else from this, ask whoever quotes you these three questions before you sign anything.
Who owns the domain and the site files when the project is done? The answer should be you, in full, with the login credentials handed over.
What happens when something needs changing six months from now? Find out whether that is a quick fix, a paid add-on, or something you cannot touch without going back to whoever built it.
Is the price fixed, or hourly? A fixed number means you know what you are paying before the work starts. Hourly billing means the final total depends on how the project goes, which is a very different kind of risk to take on.
Those three answers will tell you more about whether a quote is a good deal than the number by itself ever will. If you want to see exactly what our own tier two build includes, the packages breakdown lays it out in full, and the FAQ covers a few more questions people ask before they book a call.