The four routes, and what each one charges for
The way websites get sold in New Brunswick is the same as anywhere else in Atlantic Canada. What differs is the mix. Moncton has a deep pool of freelancers and small shops, Fredericton has a lot of agencies that grew up around government and university work, and Saint John sits somewhere between. The four routes below cover nearly every quote you will see, whether you are in Moncton, Fredericton, Saint John or Woodstock.
A website builder you run yourself
Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, or WordPress with a page builder. The cash cost is a monthly plan, usually somewhere between fifteen and fifty dollars, plus a domain. For a brand-new business testing whether anyone will buy, that is a sensible place to start, and I would not talk anyone out of it.
The bill you do not see is your own time. Most owners lose a weekend getting it standing, then an evening every couple of months fixing hours, swapping photos and wondering why a page looks wrong on a phone. If you would rather spend those evenings quoting jobs, price your time in honestly before you call this the cheap option.
A freelancer, paid once
Somewhere from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand for a small site. Good freelancers are some of the best value in the province. The risk is what happens after launch: the job is finished, the freelancer has moved on, and your request to change the phone number eight months later lands in an inbox with fifty other things in it.
The fix is simple. Ask before you sign what a change costs after launch, how fast they answer, and what happens if they take a full-time job. A freelancer with clear answers to those three questions is a safe bet.
An agency
Five thousand dollars and up for a small site, and fifteen thousand or more for anything with custom features, booking, or a lot of content. You are paying for several people: a strategist, a designer, a developer, a project manager, and the office that holds them. On a complicated project for a large organization that team is worth it.
On a five-page site for an electrician in Riverview, most of the price is coordination between people who all need to be paid, and almost all of it is due before the site has brought in a single call.
A flat build with a monthly plan
A small fixed fee for the build, then a monthly rate that covers hosting, security, backups and ongoing changes. That is how Alp Web Studio works, so read this part knowing it describes my own model. The upside is a low number to start and a person on the hook for the site after launch. The downside is that over many years the monthly adds up to more than a one-off build you never touch again.
What actually drives the price up or down
Quotes look different because the jobs underneath them are different. When you are comparing two numbers, check which of these each one includes.
- Page count, and what is on each page. Five pages of plain text and photos is a small job. Five pages where each needs its own photo shoot, service list and FAQ is a bigger one.
- Who writes the words. Copywriting is often the largest hidden cost. If the quote does not name who writes the content, plan on writing it yourself.
- A second language. Covered in detail below, because in New Brunswick it comes up on nearly every call.
- Features that do real work. Online booking, a quote estimator, a customer login, payments. Each one is a piece of software, and software is where prices jump.
- Moving an old site. Carrying old pages across with redirects, so the search traffic you already have is not thrown away, takes time that a fresh build does not.
- Hosting and support after launch. Either it is in the monthly, or it is a separate bill, or it is nobody's job. Ask which.
- Who you are paying for. A team costs more than one person. That is fair when the project needs a team.
Line two quotes up against the list above. When one is three times the other, the gap usually sits in two or three of those lines, and once you can see which ones, you can decide whether you need them.
What a bilingual site adds to the cost
New Brunswick is the only officially bilingual province, and around Moncton, Dieppe, Shediac, Edmundston and the Acadian Peninsula a large share of your customers may search in French first. For most private businesses, whether the website is in one language or two is a business decision rather than a legal one. Language obligations in the province are aimed at government and public bodies. If you hold a government contract, read it, because some contracts carry their own language terms.
When a second language is worth adding, the cost lands in three places.
- Translation. The largest part, and usually billed per word by a professional translator. Machine translation is cheap and tends to read as machine-translated to exactly the francophone customers you were hoping to reach, so budget for a person, or at least a person who reviews the machine's work.
- Page structure. A bilingual site is a matched set of pages in each language, with a switch between them and markup that tells Google which version is for which audience. Done properly, that is a one-time setup, and each page then exists twice.
- Upkeep. Every change after launch happens twice. A new service, a price, a holiday closure. If your support plan bills changes by the hour, a bilingual site roughly doubles that line.
On my own pricing, a bilingual build stays at the same build fee and monthly plan, because the second language is more pages rather than more software. What it adds is time, mostly spent waiting on translated copy. Other studios charge for it differently, and some quote the French side as a separate project, so ask each one how they handle it and who is responsible for the translation.
A sensible middle ground for a business that is mostly English-speaking: translate the home page, the main service pages and the contact page, and leave the blog or news in one language. The pages people use to decide whether to call get both languages, and the upkeep stays manageable.
How long each route takes
Timelines matter more than people expect, because a site that launches in March instead of May is two extra months of calls.
- Builder, done yourself: as fast as your evenings allow. A simple site can go live in a weekend. Most owners take a few weeks of on-and-off work.
- Freelancer: often two to six weeks, depending on how busy they are and how fast you send content.
- Agency: commonly several weeks to a few months, because discovery, design approval, development and review are separate stages run by different people.
- Alp Web Studio: a typical build takes one to two weeks. A bilingual build usually runs toward three, with most of the extra time spent waiting on translation.
Whoever you hire, the slowest part is almost always content. Photos, service descriptions, the service area, the about page. Gather those before you sign and almost any timeline shrinks.
Compare quotes over three years, not on day one
A website is a commitment to keep something running for years, so compare the routes over years. Three is a useful window: long enough for hosting and changes to add up, short enough that you probably have not rebuilt yet.
Here is an illustrative five-page site for a small trade in Fredericton, English only.
- Builder: around $30 a month for the plan and $25 a year for the domain comes to about $1,150 over three years in cash, plus your evenings.
- Agency: say $6,000 for the build, plus hosting and a few paid changes a year. Over three years you are likely past $8,000, with most of it paid up front.
- Alp Starter: $800 to build and $99 a month for hosting, security, backups and changes. That is $1,988 in year one and $4,364 over three years. You own the files and the domain from launch, and the monthly is month to month.
- Alp Lead Machine, for trades that quote jobs: $800 to build and $399 a month, which adds a quote estimator, missed-call text-back and an owner dashboard. That is $5,588 in the first year.
These are worked numbers for one scenario, not a survey of the New Brunswick market. Agency prices especially vary from one shop to the next. Do the same arithmetic with the actual quotes you are holding, because the habit matters more than my figures.
The arithmetic still does not tell you which site will bring in more work, and that is the half of the decision that matters most. A well-built site that turns visitors into calls is worth more than a cheap one that does not, whatever either costs. The full pricing page lays out what each plan includes, and the New Brunswick page covers how builds work across the province.