How much does a website cost in Australia?
Most Australian businesses pay $5,000 to $15,000 for a site designed and built for them, and close to nothing to run it if it was built right. Here are the bands, what it costs to keep alive, what we charge, and one real build itemised line by line.
- DIY
- $0–1,500 a year
- Template
- $2,000–5,000
- Designed
- $5,000–15,000
- Custom
- $15,000–40,000
- To run
- $0–150 a month
- Price
- see our own price list
Every figure on this page excludes GST.
Australia · 2026$5,000 to $15,000, if someone designs and builds it for you.
In Australia in 2026, a website designed and built for a business by a studio or an agency costs $5,000 to $15,000. Below that, from about $2,000, you are paying someone to fit a template. Above it, from about $15,000, you are paying for the site to do a job: bookings, a portal, a large catalogue, systems it has to talk to. Do it yourself with a website builder and the cash cost is $0 to $1,500 a year, and the real cost is your own time. Running it is a much smaller bill than most guides suggest: close to nothing a month for a site built ahead of time and served from a CDN, $30 to $100 a month to host WordPress and keep it patched, and the $500 to $5,000 a month quoted elsewhere is marketing, not upkeep.
What each band buys.
Five ways to get a website, in the order people usually consider them. These are what an Australian buyer pays in 2026, not what we charge; our own numbers are further down.
| Budget | What that buys | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Budget $0–1,500 a year Do it yourself | What that buys A Wix, Squarespace or Shopify template you set up yourself. Subscription, domain, and a paid theme if you want one. Every hour of the work is yours. | Who it suits Testing an idea, a side business, or anyone whose customers will never judge them on a website. |
| Budget $2,000–5,000 A template, fitted | What that buys A freelancer or a small shop puts your logo, colours and words into a bought theme. Five to ten pages, live in two or three weeks. It looks like what it is. | Who it suits A first site when cash is the binding constraint, or a business that needs to exist online and nothing more. |
| Budget $5,000–15,000 Designed and built Where we sit | What that buys Designed from nothing for your business, built on a CMS your team can actually use, structured for search and built to load in under a second. Eight to twenty pages, four to eight weeks. | Who it suits Established businesses where the site is the first impression, and one extra enquiry a month pays for the whole thing. |
| Budget $15,000–40,000 Built to do a job | What that buys All of the above, plus the site doing work: bookings, a client portal, payments, a CRM it stays in sync with, a catalogue with real filters, or several hundred pages migrated off an old platform. | Who it suits Businesses whose website does the work rather than describing it. |
| Budget $40,000+ Software with a website on the front | What that buys A custom application. Marketplaces, multi-site platforms, anything with logins, roles, permissions and a data model of its own. | Who it suits Product businesses, and organisations running several brands off one codebase. |
Figures exclude GST. We publish our own numbers below: we start at $9,000 and most builds land between $9,000 and $18,000, so we sit at the top of the third band and into the fourth.
One real build, line by line.
Every guide to this question, ours included, quotes a range. Here is what one build came to. Joris is a buyer's agent who started in Newcastle with no site, no rankings and established agents to compete with. He needed to look established and be found: service pages, success stories and resources written for the searches Newcastle buyers actually make, on a domain with no history. It loads in under half a second.
- Client
- Buyer's agent, Newcastle. New business, no site
- Scope
- Marketing site, CloudCannon CMS, structured data
- Built in
- 14 days design, 3 weeks build
- Live at
- joris.com.au
- Design 14 days, by a partner studio we work with
- $3,600
- Development 3 weeks. Pre-rendered SvelteKit on Cloudflare, edited in CloudCannon
- $7,000
- Total ex GST
- $10,600
Costs to run
- Hosting Cloudflare, his own account
- $0
- CMS CloudCannon on our partner rate. List pricing is higher
- US$10
- Care plan covers this site and the AI systems we also built him
- $350
Everything else sits inside a free tier. His accounts, his name on the bills.
Published with Joris's permission. Excludes GST.
Ex GST$3,400 more bought 958 pages for somebody else. Edtripper's website had to become a directory teachers would use, 958 venues filtered by subject, year group and attraction type, publishable by a team with no developer. It came to $14,000, $4,000 of design and $10,000 of build, and runs on $0 of hosting with Sanity inside its free tier. Not much more than a marketing site, because you pay for templates, not pages. Read the Edtripper case study. Neither number includes the AI systems we later built for both clients, which are priced in the AI automation cost guide.
What it costs to keep alive.
Building it happens once. This is the bill that arrives every month, and it turns almost entirely on whether the site runs software when somebody visits it.
| Per month | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Per month $0 Hosting a pre-rendered site | What it covers Every page is built ahead of time and served from a CDN, so nothing executes when a visitor arrives and there is nothing to pay for. Both builds priced above host for nothing, and so does this page you are reading. |
| Per month $30–100 Managed WordPress hosting | What it covers A server running PHP and a database on every request, with backups and a CDN in front. Cheaper hosting exists; this is what it costs to be fast and to stay up. |
| Per month $2–4 A .com.au domain | What it covers About $20 to $40 a year. The one bill nobody should ever let lapse. |
| Per month $0–200 The CMS | What it covers Free at the sizes most businesses run at. Edtripper's Sanity costs nothing at 958 venues; Joris is on CloudCannon at US$10 a month through our partner rate, and list pricing is higher. Paid plans start when you add editors, roles, or a lot of assets. |
| Per month $250–350 A care plan Ours | What it covers Monitoring, updates, small changes and a monthly performance snapshot. Edtripper pays $250 for the website side, Joris $350 for the site plus the AI systems, and Made Quiet pays nothing and buys changes by the hour. Optional on a pre-rendered site, which runs perfectly well without anyone. Not really optional on WordPress, where somebody has to patch it every month. |
| Per month $500–5,000 A growth retainer | What it covers SEO, content and ads. Often worth having, and a completely different purchase from keeping a website online. Guides that fold it into "running costs" make a website look five times more expensive than it is. |
Excludes GST. Australian list prices as at September 2026.
What we charge.
- Website build pre-rendered or WordPress, designed from scratch
- from $9,000 typically $9–18k
- Content migration from an existing site
- quoted typically $1–4k
- Care plan monitoring, updates, small changes, monthly performance snapshot
- from $250/month
What moves the price within those ranges:
- templates, not pages. Twenty pages on five templates costs less than eight that are all different
- where the words and pictures come from, and how much content moves across from the old site
- what the site has to talk to. A booking system, a CRM, payments, an in-house system with no API
- how many people edit it, and whether anything needs approval before it publishes
- how many old URLs have to be redirected so the rankings survive
- whether the site does a job, a portal or a catalogue, or describes one
Why we start at $9,000
Because the third band is where a website starts paying for itself, and we would rather turn work away than build something at $4,000 that we already know needs replacing in two years. Three senior people in Sydney do the work, and you own the code and the hosting account.
Fixed quote after a 20-minute call. No calculator; the variables that actually move the price are never on a form.
Ask away.
Nine things people ask before they spend the money. Still one missing? Ask us.
What is a fair price to pay for a website?
For a small business site designed and built for you, $5,000 to $15,000 in Australia in 2026. Under $2,000 you are buying a fitted template, which is a fair price for what that is. Over $15,000, someone should be able to point at the thing the extra buys: an integration, a portal, a migration, a catalogue. If nobody can name it, it is not a fair price.
Is it cheaper to build a website myself?
In cash, yes: $0 to $1,500 a year on Wix, Squarespace or Shopify. In time, usually not. A first build takes most owners 40 to 80 hours, and what you get is a template, fine right up until the site has to do something templates do not do. Build it yourself while the business is finding its feet, and pay someone once the site starts costing you enquiries.
How much does a website cost per month?
Close to nothing if it is pre-rendered, because nothing runs when a visitor arrives. Of the two builds priced on this page, one runs on $0 a month and the other on US$10, and that ten dollars is the CMS rather than the hosting. Budget $30 to $100 a month for managed WordPress hosting instead, plus $20 to $40 a year for a .com.au domain either way. A care plan starts at $250 a month and is optional on a pre-rendered site. The $500 to $5,000 a month quoted in other guides is a marketing retainer.
How much should a small business website cost?
Between $5,000 and $15,000 across the Australian market, and between $9,000 and $18,000 with us. The floor is set by the work that does not scale down: structure, design, a CMS, content, testing and launch. A five-page site and a fifteen-page site cost far more alike than people expect.
How much does it cost to build a website that loads in under a second?
No more than a well-built site, because speed is decided in week one rather than added to a quote: our builds start at $9,000 and load in under a second by default. The full answer, with four sites timed and what to ask any agency that promises it, is in our guide to <a href="/guides/websites-that-load-in-under-a-second/">websites that load in under a second</a>.
How long does it take to build a website?
Four to eight weeks for a designed and built site, and most of that is waiting on content rather than code. We quote a launch date after a 20-minute call and hold it.
Do I have to pay for hosting and maintenance forever?
You pay for hosting, which on a pre-rendered site is close to nothing. Maintenance is a choice. A pre-rendered site has no plugins, no database and no login page, so there is nothing to patch and it will still be running in three years without us. A WordPress site needs somebody every month, whether that is us, another agency, or you.
What is the cheapest way to host a website in Australia?
Free, if the site is pre-rendered. Cloudflare, Netlify and Vercel all serve static pages at no cost at the volumes a business site does, from servers in Sydney. Shared hosting at $5 a month is more expensive than free and considerably slower.
Why do two quotes for the same website differ by $20,000?
Because "website" describes about twenty different products. Ask each quote the same four questions: what happens to our old URLs, who can edit the site afterwards, what will it load in, and what happens if the person who built it disappears. The gap usually closes into something explainable. When it does not, you have learned something.
- Websites under a second. What a site that loads in under a second costs, with four sites timed.
- WordPress or pre-rendered? Speed, running cost and editing side by side, and when each is the right call.
- Web app costs. What a portal, a dashboard or a booking system costs, with our own product itemised.
- Websites. What we build and how. Pre-rendered, or WordPress done properly.