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 moves the price, what we charge, and two real builds 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 separate bill, and a much smaller one than most guides suggest. A site built ahead of time and served from a CDN costs close to nothing a month, because nothing runs when a visitor arrives. A site that executes software on every request, WordPress being the common case, costs $30 to $100 a month to host and needs someone to keep it patched. Neither number includes marketing, which is where the $500 to $5,000 a month retainers quoted elsewhere actually live.
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 fast. 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.
The cheap one is rarely the cheap one.
The number that decides this is not what the site costs to build. It is what it costs over four years. A $3,000 site that takes seven seconds to load, that nobody on your team can edit, and that needs a developer booked in for every change, spends the rest of its life costing you money in ways that never appear on an invoice.
We have measured both ends of it. Wingboy's site took 27 seconds to load before we rebuilt it and 0.7 seconds after, with the same content. NIODA's WordPress site took ten seconds, and exactly one person in the organisation could edit it; the rebuild made that four, and they have published 391 changes themselves since. Neither business was badly served by a platform. They were badly served by a site nobody owned.
What actually moves the number.
- 01
Templates, not pages.
Twenty pages built on five templates costs less than eight pages that are all different. When a quote asks how many pages you need, this is the thing it is really asking.
The two receipts below are a marketing site and a 958-venue directory, and they came in four hundred dollars apart.
- 02
Where the words and pictures come from.
Writing the copy, shooting the photography, or moving three hundred pages off an old site are each their own line on the quote. Content is the most common reason a build runs late and over.
- 03
What it has to talk to.
A contact form is free. A booking system, a CRM, a payment gateway, an inventory file, or an in-house system with no API, each add days and each can add a week if the other side is slow.
- 04
Who is allowed to edit it.
One person changing a headline is a different build from twelve people across three offices, with different permissions and an approval step before anything publishes.
- 05
What happens to the old URLs.
A site that already ranks needs every old address mapped to a new one before launch day, or you buy a redesign and pay for it again in lost traffic.
- 06
Whether speed is a requirement or a wish.
Building for sub-second loads is a decision made in the first week, about how pages are rendered and where they are served from. Retrofitting it afterwards is a second project.
Two real builds, line by line.
Every guide to this question, ours included, quotes a range. Here is what two builds actually came to, and the pair is worth more than either on its own.
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
- $10,000
- Total ex GST
- $13,600
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 GSTThe same money, 958 pages.
Edtripper's website had to become a directory teachers would actually use: 958 venues across every state and territory, filtered by subject, year group and attraction type, with the whole thing publishable by a team that does not include a developer.
A marketing site and a 958-venue directory, four hundred dollars apart. That is the first driver on the list doing its work. You are paying for templates, not for pages, and a directory is one set of templates with a great deal of content behind it.
- Client
- Founder-led education business, Sydney
- Scope
- Directory site, Sanity CMS, 958 venue listings
- Built in
- 7 days design, 14 days build
- Live at
- edtripper.com
- Design 7 days. One set of templates, used 958 times
- $4,000
- Development 14 days. SvelteKit on Cloudflare Workers, state-aware queries, filters
- $10,000
- Total ex GST
- $14,000
Costs to run
- Hosting Cloudflare Workers, their own account
- $0
- CMS Sanity, inside the free tier at 958 venues
- $0
- Email Resend, on our business account at no charge to them
- $0
- Care plan the website side. The phone fleet is billed separately
- $250
Hosting, the CMS and email are all free at this size. The care plan is a choice, not a requirement.
Published with Edtripper's permission. Excludes GST.
Ex GSTBoth sit in the third band. Neither number includes the AI systems we later built for the same two clients, which are itemised 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 itemised 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
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, you own the code and the hosting account, and there is no honest version of that at $3,000.
Fixed quote after a 20-minute call. No calculator; the variables that actually move the price are never on a form.
Ask away.
Eight 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, which is 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 itemised 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 about $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, not the cost of keeping a website online.
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 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.