How much does it cost to have a website with Canva?

Canva's website builder is free — as long as you never want a real web address, an online store, or a way to book appointments. That "free" price tag hides a set of limits that matter a lot once your website has to actually work for your business.

Here's what the free tier really gets you. You can build and publish a one-page site hosted on a Canva subdomain — something like sitename.my.canva.site — with some non-intrusive Canva branding attached, at no cost according to an independent review of Canva Websites. If you want your own domain name, you'll need the full Canva Pro subscription at $15/month or $120/year per person, per Canva's published pricing breakdown. Notably, Canva doesn't sell a separate website plan — the same review points out that a comparable one-page builder, Carrd, costs just $19/year.

The bigger issue isn't the price. It's what's missing.

Canva's website builder is a design tool first and a website platform second. The same independent review found that while the platform offers 837 templates — more than most established website builders — it lacks core business functionality like forms, SEO-friendly heading tags, blogging, e-commerce, and appointment scheduling. That confines it to simple brochure-style sites, which is fine for a portfolio and frustrating for anyone trying to generate leads or sell online.

• No custom domain on the free plan — your address is a Canva subdomain
• No e-commerce, so you can't take orders or payments through the site
• No blogging or appointment scheduling — the features that turn a site into a working business tool
• Limited SEO structure, including missing heading tags that search engines rely on

To be fair, Canva has scale. Since launching its website feature in 2022, more than 89 million websites have been created with Canva, backed by over 100 million photos, videos, audio files, fonts, and illustrations. Its AI tools — Magic Write, Magic Media, and Dream Lab — are available to help with design. But these are design-focused AI features, not the kind of AI that runs a business behind the scenes.

That's the gap that matters. A small business website needs to capture leads, follow up automatically, book appointments, and take payments — not just look good. Done-for-you solutions like AI Business Sites were built for exactly that: a custom website paired with a CRM, booking, e-commerce, and ongoing content, all set up and managed for you. If you're weighing Canva's free option against a site that actually does the work, it's worth a 30-minute, no-obligation strategy call to talk through what your business actually needs.

The sticker price looks almost too good to be true: $15 a month for a website on your own domain. But for a business owner, the real question isn't what Canva Pro costs — it's what that money actually buys.

Here's the honest breakdown. Canva doesn't sell a standalone website plan. Publishing to a custom domain (and removing Canva branding) requires the full Canva Pro subscription at $15/month or $120/year per person. If you skip that, your site lives on a Canva subdomain like sitename.my.canva.site with Canva branding attached — fine for a hobby page, less fine when customers are Googling your business.

What that subscription covers is design hosting, not functionality. An independent review of Canva Websites found the platform lacks forms, SEO-friendly heading tags, blogging, e-commerce, and appointment scheduling — the features most small businesses actually need from a website. Canva's strength is visual design, with 837 templates on offer, but a beautiful one-page brochure doesn't capture leads, book jobs, or follow up with customers.

For comparison, Carrd — another one-page builder — costs just $19 a year, which puts Canva's pricing in perspective for what is essentially the same product category.

So what does a business actually need from its website? Most service businesses need the site to work as a system, not a brochure:

• Lead capture with instant follow-up, so no inquiry slips through
• A built-in CRM to track every contact and deal
• Ongoing SEO content — service pages, location pages, blog posts — that Google can index
• Automation that handles the busywork behind the scenes

None of that is available natively in Canva. You'd need to duct-tape separate tools together — a form service, a CRM, an email platform, a booking tool — each with its own subscription and its own learning curve. That's how "cheap" quietly becomes six subscriptions and hours of maintenance.

This is where done-for-you solutions like AI Business Sites take a different approach: rather than handing you design software, the $1,497 setup plus $497/month covers a custom-built website with lead capture, CRM, and an ongoing SEO content engine — managed entirely on your behalf. You're not paying for access to tools; you're paying for the work to be done.

Canva Pro is a great deal if your goal is designing graphics and simple web pages. But if your goal is a website that generates leads and runs alongside your business, the $15/month price tag only covers the easy part — and the hard part is where websites earn their keep.

Canva's website builder costs little — but it delivers little for a business that needs to be found, followed up with, and paid. According to an independent feature review, the platform lacks forms, SEO-friendly heading tags, blogging, e-commerce, and appointment scheduling, which limits it to brochure-style sites. That gap is why many owners compare it against done-for-you alternatives.

The pricing math explains the trade-off. Canva Pro runs $15/month or $120/year per person, and there's no separate website plan — custom domain publishing requires the full Pro subscription, per current pricing analysis. You get design tools, but you still build every page yourself, write every word yourself, and wire up any business functionality yourself.

A done-for-you model like AI Business Sites takes the opposite approach: a $1,497 setup plus $497/month covers the build and the ongoing management. That includes 85+ pages live at launch — 25–30 hand-crafted core pages plus 60 AI-generated SEO pages — plus 14+ new content pieces every month, written and published for you.

What that monthly fee actually replaces matters more than the sticker price:

• A CRM with pipelines and lead capture, so no inquiry slips through
• 24/7 chat and voice agents on the site, answering from your own knowledgebase
• Jobs, quotes, scheduling, and invoicing — the full quote-to-payment loop, included
• Online selling when you need it: store, menus, bookings, or tickets with Stripe

Ownership is the other differentiator. With Canva, your site lives on their subdomain unless you pay for Pro, and the underlying platform is theirs regardless. With AI Business Sites, you own the code, content, domain, and data — and if you ever leave, everything goes with you, month-to-month with no long-term contract.

The honest framing: Canva is a design tool that happens to make websites, and it's a good one — 89 million+ sites have been created with it since 2022, per Canva's own announcement. But a website that answers questions, follows up on leads, and collects payments isn't something a template can do. Free is only free if your time is — and for most owners, the hours saved matter more than the subscription saved.