Custom website cost

A custom real estate website in Canada costs between $5,000 and $25,000+ in 2026 for a genuinely bespoke build, with professional projects clustering at $8,000–20,000; semi-custom work runs $1,000–5,000, template-based builds $200–1,000, designer labour bills at $50–200 an hour, and maintenance adds $35–300 a month for as long as the site lives (published dev-shop and vendor pricing, surveyed July 2026). Those bands are real but slippery — the same dollar figure buys wildly different things — so this page decodes what each tier actually contains and where the quotes hide their edges.

The price bands, decoded

The bands describe the design-and-build contract only. Listing data (board licensing plus integration), hosting, and lead-capture tooling ride on top — and in real estate they are the point of the site, so a quote that leaves them out has priced the frame and not the house. When a custom build is genuinely justified, and what the process looks like from brief to launch, is the subject of custom real estate websites.

Where custom quotes hide their edges

Four questions expose the true price. Scope: how many unique page designs — a “custom site” with one designed template repeated is semi-custom wearing a custom invoice. Revisions: how many rounds are included, because rounds beyond the contract bill hourly. Ownership: whether you own the design files and can leave with them — the question that matters most and gets asked least. Aftercare: what happens at 9pm when something breaks, priced per the maintenance band above. Get all four in writing and the market’s quotes become comparable; skip them and every project “runs over” on schedule.

The middle path, priced in the open

Full custom and bare template are not the only points on the line. Our own productized version prices the middle explicitly: design packages at $1,000 (Refined — palette, typography, and hero craft on a designed template), $2,500 (Bespoke — a fully custom homepage plus secondary pages), $5,000 (Atelier — a broader studio build), and $7,500 (Heritage — top-to-bottom bespoke, ten-plus pages), each one-time, published on our design services page, and delivered on top of a platform where the MLS feed, hosting, and capture already run. We publish those numbers for the same reason this page exists: this market prices better when the figures are on the table.

Custom-build cost versus subscription cost

Keep the two ledgers separate. This page prices a build — capital cost, then maintenance. The subscription route prices an operation — a monthly fee that includes the data plane, hosting, and upkeep; that ledger, including our own published $89–999 CAD range, lives in what a realtor website costs in Canada. The honest comparison is total cost over a horizon: a $12,000 build plus $150 monthly maintenance against a subscription at its all-in rate, both over three years, both delivering the data and capture your market expects. Run that arithmetic before falling in love with either answer — it is the one calculation the quotes will not do for you.