How much does a website really cost in Australia?

Two current Australian guides, side by side. Both come from businesses that sell websites or website leads, so read them as a guide to the market, not a quote.

• A small business website (5 to 10 pages): $2,000 to $6,000, which What's The Damage says is what most Australian small businesses pay.
• Most small business websites in Sydney: $2,800 to $8,000 (Creative Baguette).
• A custom build: $6,000 to $15,000, and $15,000 to $40,000 for a larger site joined up to other systems (What's The Damage).
• An online shop: $5,000 to $60,000 or more (What's The Damage), or from around $8,000 to $9,000 in Sydney (Creative Baguette).
• Paying by the hour: freelancers about $80 to $150 an hour and agencies $100 to $250 (What's The Damage).

A website price is mostly time, so anything that adds hours adds dollars. The big ones:

• How many pages there are, and who writes the words on them. Writing is often the slowest part of a build.
• Whether the design is drawn from scratch or starts from a template.
• Anything the site has to do, not just show: bookings, payments, customer logins, quote tools, a link into your other software.
• Selling online. A shop needs products, payments, shipping and stock set up and tested.
• Who does the work. Agencies charge more an hour than freelancers (see the rates above).
• What happens after launch. Some prices include hosting and changes and many do not, which is where the monthly bill comes from.

When you compare quotes, compare what is in them, not just the bottom line: the number of pages, who writes the words, whose name the domain is registered in, and what the monthly fee covers.

A website keeps costing something after it goes live. These are the running costs the same guides list:

• Hosting (where the site lives): $15 to $150 a month (What's The Damage). Basic shared hosting can start lower, at about $6.95 to $29.95 a month in GoDaddy's figures quoted by Creative Baguette.
• Your .com.au domain: $15 to $30 a year (What's The Damage), or $20 to $50 a year in GoDaddy's figures quoted by Creative Baguette. How to buy a .com.au domain.
• Care and maintenance (updates, backups, small changes): $50 to $300 a month (What's The Damage), or $100 to $500 a month for Australian agency plans in Keen to Design's figures quoted by Creative Baguette.
• Business email: about $10 to $25 per person a month before tax, on Microsoft's and Google's own Australian price lists (Microsoft 365 business plans, Google Workspace pricing). How business email works.
• A website builder, if you build it yourself: $30 to $60 a month (What's The Damage), plus your own time.

Added up, What's The Damage puts the usual running cost at $75 to $400 a month after launch. Budget for it from day one, so the site is looked after the first time something needs fixing.

A website builder is the cheapest way to get something online: a monthly subscription and your own evenings. It works if you enjoy it and have the time. What you really pay with is hours: writing every page, choosing photos, setting up the enquiry form and the domain, then keeping it all current. If those hours are worth more to you on the tools, that is the comparison to make.

A Facebook page is a good start and costs nothing, but it has limits a website does not. It runs on Facebook's terms, it cannot give you an email address on your own business name, and it cannot hold a separate page for each service and each suburb you work in, which is what people type into Google. Keep the Facebook page: a website works best beside it, not instead of it.