How Much Does a Website Cost in Australia? Real Prices, Honestly Explained

Ask ten Australian web companies what a website costs and nine of them will say it depends. That is technically true and practically useless. You are trying to work out whether to spend $500 or $15,000, and the industry has decided the polite thing to do is make you sit through a discovery call before anyone says a number. I have run an agency in Melbourne for years and I am tired of it. So here are the actual numbers, including ours.

Why nobody publishes prices

There are three reasons, and only one of them is defensible.

The defensible one: genuinely custom work varies enormously. A booking platform for a multi site clinic is not a fixed price product, and quoting one without a scoping conversation is how projects go wrong for everyone.

The second reason is that a lot of agencies price by what they think you can pay. A tradie gets quoted $2,500. A medical practice gets quoted $9,000 for the same build, because medical practices have money. This is real and it is common, and hidden pricing is what makes it possible.

The third reason is that some shops know their price will not survive being seen next to anybody else's. If the number only works when you hear it after forty minutes of rapport building, it is not a strong number.

Option one: doing it yourself

The builders are a legitimate choice for some businesses, so let us be fair about what they actually cost. These are the plans most Australian small businesses end up on, converted to AUD and stated per month.

Notice something. Over five years a Squarespace site at $60 per month costs about $3,600 plus GST in subscription alone, and you have done all the work yourself. That is not a criticism of Squarespace. It is a reminder that monthly fees are not small, they are just quiet.

DIY genuinely suits you if you have time, some design instinct and a simple business. It suits you badly if your evenings are already full, or if you need to rank in local search, because the part that wins you customers is not the template. It is the structure, the copy and the setup underneath.

Option two: freelancers

An Australian freelance web designer typically charges $60 to $150 per hour, or $1,200 to $5,000 for a small business site. The good ones are excellent value. You get one person who cares, direct communication and no account manager tax.

The risks are the obvious ones. One person gets sick, gets a full time job, or gets busy with a bigger client. I have inherited a lot of half finished sites where the freelancer simply stopped answering emails. Ask any freelancer what happens if they are unavailable for a month, and ask who holds the hosting logins.

Option three: small agencies

Small Australian agencies, meaning two to fifteen people, generally quote $3,000 to $12,000 for a business website. That covers a designer, a developer, someone who writes and someone who answers the phone. There is real overhead in that and it is not padding.

This is the band where quotes vary the most. We regularly see clients bring us two quotes for the same brief where one is $3,400 and the other is $11,000, and the deliverables list is nearly identical. The difference is usually studio overhead and how many rounds of design exploration are baked in.

Option four: large agencies

Full service agencies with twenty plus staff start around $20,000 and go past $100,000. That money buys strategy, user research, custom design systems, accessibility auditing, load testing and a project manager whose whole job is your project.

If you are a national brand, a listed company or a business where the website carries millions in revenue, this is correct spending. If you are a plumber in Preston, it is not. There is no shame in either. The mistake is buying enterprise process for a five page site.

Option five: offshore

Offshore development quotes land anywhere from $150 to $2,000. Some offshore teams are genuinely skilled and I have worked alongside excellent developers overseas. The problems are rarely technical. They are time zones, contract enforcement, Australian consumer expectations, GST invoicing and the fact that when something breaks at 4pm on a Friday you are sending an email into the void.

If you go this route, insist on your own hosting account, your own domain registrar account, and a copy of all files. Those three things turn a risky purchase into a survivable one.

Price bands by type of website

All figures are AUD and exclude GST. The budget column is not a trap price, it is what a well organised build with a proven system genuinely costs when the scope is tight and the process is efficient.

What actually drives the price

Five things move a web quote, and page count is the least important of them.

The ongoing costs nobody itemises

The SSL line is the one that annoys me most. Free certificates have been standard since 2016. Charging $200 a year for something that costs nothing and renews automatically is not a service, it is a hope that you will not check.

Four traps worth knowing about

1. The monthly website plan where you never own anything

You pay $99 to $250 per month, forever, with no build fee. Sounds friendly. Read the agreement. In most of these arrangements the provider owns the site, the code and sometimes the domain. Stop paying and the site disappears. Over three years at $149 per month you have paid $5,364 plus GST and you own nothing at all. Some of these plans also lock you in for 36 or 48 months with early exit fees.

2. The cheap build with no SEO foundation

A $500 site that is invisible in search is not a bargain. If nobody has set page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, a sitemap, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile links and basic local schema, the site is a brochure sitting in a drawer. Ask specifically what search setup is included before you sign. Our approach to that is set out under local SEO.

3. Quotes that quietly exclude content and images

Read the assumptions section. If it says client to supply all text and imagery, that is a real cost you are now carrying. Either you write six pages yourself or you pay a copywriter $900 to $3,000. Two quotes are not comparable unless you know which one includes words.

4. Hourly rates with no cap

Estimated at 40 hours at $140 per hour is not a quote, it is a starting position. Ask for a fixed price or a written not to exceed figure. Anyone confident in their process can give you one.

What you should actually pay, by business type

So how do we charge $399 plus GST?

Our five page business website is $399 plus GST. That includes a custom logo, the first year of hosting, an SSL certificate and SEO setup. After year one, hosting and maintenance renew at $79 per year plus GST. Ecommerce and custom builds are quoted separately, because they genuinely vary.

People ask what the catch is. Fair question. Here is the honest answer, with no defensiveness.

• We are not paying CBD rent. No showroom, no reception, no boardroom that gets used twice a month.
• We have no sales team. Nobody earns commission on your project, so nobody has an incentive to inflate the scope.
• The process is standardised. Five page service business sites share the same structure: home, about, services, gallery or work, contact. We have built that shape hundreds of times and we are fast at it.
• Design is a refined system, not a blank page. You get a professional layout tuned to your brand and colours, not four weeks of concept exploration. That is the actual trade off, and it is the right one for most small businesses.
• Hosting is genuinely cheap at scale. A small business site costs very little to host. Charging $79 per year plus GST still works because we host many sites on efficient infrastructure.
• We would rather have volume than margin. Two hundred happy small businesses paying a fair price beats twenty clients who feel they overpaid.

What you do not get at that price: bespoke illustration, a research phase, a brand strategy workshop, custom software, or a dedicated account manager. If you need those, you should be paying $10,000 or more, and you should pay it to someone who does that work properly. We will tell you when that is the case. You can look at what we have delivered on our portfolio and decide whether the standard fits.

How to compare quotes properly

Put every quote into the same table and fill in every cell. If a provider will not tell you what goes in a cell, write unknown, and treat unknown as a risk.

If you want the same information for our work, it is all published on the pricing page, and the build process is described under small business websites. No call required to see a number.

Frequently Asked Questions