A small business website in Australia costs somewhere between $12 and $2,500 a month to keep running, and almost none of that spread is explained by how good the website is. It is explained by 2 things: how much of the work you do yourself, and whether anybody is being paid to improve the site after it launches. Below is every line that recurs, what each one costs, and what 5 real arrangements total per month.
The lines that recur, priced monthly
Website costs get published as annual figures, which is unhelpful, because nobody budgets a business in years. Here is the same information in the unit you actually pay in. Where a figure has no defensible range we have left it blank rather than filling the gap.
| Line item | Per month | What decides it |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | $2 to $3 | Billed yearly at $20 to $30. The cheapest thing you own and the only one that must never lapse. |
| Hosting | $10 to $50 | Managed Australian hosting runs $120 to $600 a year. The bottom of the shared market is cheaper and shows it on your busiest day. |
| SSL certificate | $0 to $17 | Usually free through the host now, though some still bill $50 to $200 a year for it. |
| Builder subscription | $42 to $125 | Wix, Squarespace or Shopify across the first year once the plan, the domain and paid apps are counted. Stop paying and the site goes too. |
| Maintenance, security and backups | $17 to $67 | $200 to $800 a year for a managed WordPress arrangement. Do it yourself and you pay in attention instead of dollars. |
| Plugin and theme licences | Set by each vendor | Renewed annually, often above the introductory rate. Let one lapse and you keep the feature but stop receiving the security patches. |
| Business email | Per mailbox, per month | Separate from hosting far more often than people expect, and the line most commonly forgotten when a site moves. |
| Call tracking | $30 to $80 | Tells you which phone calls the website caused. Optional right up until you need to justify the other lines. |
| Changes to the site | $80 to $250 an hour | Priced as hours rather than as a fee, unless your arrangement says otherwise. This row moves most. |
| SEO bought separately | $500 to $2,500 | The work that decides whether anybody finds the site. Absent from almost every build quote. |
Note what dominates. Hosting, the line most people shop hardest on, is worth $10 to $50 a month. The hours line and the SEO line are worth an order of magnitude more, and both are invisible on the day you sign.
Your build price is a monthly cost you prepaid
Paying once does not make a website a single cost. It makes it a prepaid one. Spread the build across the number of months you honestly expect to keep the site before rebuilding, and it becomes comparable with everything else on the invoice.
- A $995 build (Havealook and Cheap Websites both publish that price) kept for 3 years is about $28 a month. Kept for 5 years, about $17.
- Tradie Web Guys quote $5,600, which is roughly $156 a month across 3 years.
- WebApex quote $7,500 for trades and construction work: about $208 a month on the same basis.
- The typical Australian agency shape of $3,000 to $10,000 upfront works out at $83 to $278 a month across 3 years, before the retainer starts.
Those prices were published by the firms named and read on 3 August 2026. Do the amortisation and the comparison stops being $0 a month against a subscription. It becomes prepaid build, plus infrastructure, plus billed hours, against 1 figure.
What 5 real arrangements cost per month
Each row below adds the recurring lines to the amortised build, so the numbers are directly comparable. They assume a site kept for 3 years, because that is roughly when a small business site starts feeling old enough to replace.
| Arrangement | All in, per month | What you carry |
|---|---|---|
| DIY on a builder | $42 to $125 | Every hour of it. The writing, the uploading, the fixing, and the afternoon a template update pushes a heading through an image. |
| One-off build, self-maintained | $12 to $70 | Infrastructure only, plus the amortised build. Nothing improves unless you commission it, and each request starts as a quote. |
| One-off build, freelancer on call | $110 to $330 | Infrastructure plus roughly 1 hour of billed work a month. Workable while the freelancer answers emails, awkward when they take a full-time job. |
| Agency retained | $583 to $2,278 | Very little, which is the point of the number. Assumes $3,000 to $10,000 upfront spread across 3 years plus a $500 to $2,000 retainer. |
| Subscription | $59 to $297 | Nothing upfront and no hourly meter. What you carry depends entirely on what the fee is defined to contain. |
The subscription band is wider than it looks. The Free Tradie Website Crew charge $79 a month. Andrew Boddy charges $59 a month plus a Squarespace subscription you pay separately, so the true figure is his fee plus whatever the platform bills you. We charge $297 a month including GST. Nobody in this tier asks for a build fee, which means the entire decision moves to what each fee is defined to cover.
The hours line is the one that actually moves
A business that never touches its website pays nothing for changes and has a genuinely cheap monthly number. The trouble is that businesses change constantly: a new service, a price rise, a suburb you have started working in, a photo of the new van. At $80 to $250 an hour, 1 change a month is $960 to $3,000 a year, which is several times the hosting.
The second question matters more than the rate. Who decides whether a request is in scope? On an hourly arrangement, every small change starts with a quote, and the predictable outcome is that you stop asking. A website that stopped being updated 18 months ago is not saving you money. It is quietly costing you the enquiries it would have earned if the new service had a page.
Where our $297 a month sits, plainly
We build the site for $0 upfront, then charge $297 a month including GST on a 12-month subscription. That is $3,564 across the year. The first invoice is issued only after launch and after tracking has been verified, and if we miss the 5 working day build window from intake you pay no monthly fee for the first 12 months.
The fee covers Australian hosting, SSL, daily backups, security monitoring, call tracking, form tracking, and every change you request through the client portal with no hourly meter running. Set against the table above it is the dearest line in the subscription tier, and dearer per month than DIY or a self-maintained one-off build. It is cheaper per month than a retained agency, and it asks for nothing before the site exists.
One comparison check before you weigh it up: ours includes GST and plenty of published prices do not say either way. A $250 quote and a $275 quote are the same quote if only one of them mentions tax.
If your website has not produced a lead from SEO within the first 90 days, you stop paying us until it does. There is no refund, and we do not promise rankings.
That clause is why we can publish a monthly figure at the top of our own tier without softening it. The model only works if the website produces work, so the risk of it not producing work stays with us until it does. The full terms are on the guarantee page, and the complete inclusions are on pricing.
Does a bigger monthly number buy better results?
Not reliably, and we will not promise a ranking or a date, because nobody honestly can. What we can do is name results and let you judge the pattern. Lucky Duck Mowing in Caloundra received its first quote request 28 minutes after the site went live: Tony in Dicky Beach, rear duplex lawn, under 100sqm. Shakin Entertainment, a DJ business in Adelaide, took its first booking enquiry on the Monday following a Friday launch. Underpinning Sydney reached the top 3 for "underpinning Sydney". Adelaide's Bathroom Network began ranking inside 8 weeks.
The counter-example is the site you are reading, and it is the most useful one we have. This domain used to run 90 URLs. Measured on the rendered HTML, 2 of its pages shared 80.4% of their 7-word phrase sequences, and 49 of the 90 had never served a single impression in Google. We cut it to 36 hand-written pages and cross-page overlap fell to 20.7%. Those 49 dead URLs never appeared as a line item on any invoice, and each one cost something to produce and to keep. A monthly number tells you what leaves your account. It tells you nothing about what any of it is doing.
Work out your own monthly number in 5 steps
- Add the infrastructure you already pay for: domain, hosting, SSL if it is billed, backups, plugin licences, mailboxes.
- Divide the build price by the number of months you expect to keep the site. Be honest about that number rather than optimistic.
- Total the hours you were billed for changes over the past year and divide by 12. If the answer is nil because you gave up asking, count that as a cost too, not a saving.
- Add any SEO bought separately. If the answer is nothing, write $0 and accept that what you own is a brochure, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to own.
- Divide the annual total by your average job value. A business with a $300 monthly total and a $400 average job needs the website to produce 9 jobs a year to break even. Everything after that is margin.
That last step settles most arguments. It converts an abstract monthly fee into a number of jobs, and most owners know instantly whether their website produces that many.
When the cheapest monthly number is the right answer
Plenty of businesses should pay as little as possible each month, and we would rather say so than take the wrong client. Skip anything with an SEO component if you live entirely on referral, subcontract to 3 builders who already have your mobile number, or sell wholesale where the searches simply do not exist. Buy the cheap build if you want a credible presence and genuinely intend to leave it alone.
Our arrangement is also the wrong fit if you need a store carrying hundreds of products, a booking platform or a membership area, because we build lead-generating websites for Australian service businesses and nothing else. It runs entirely by email and through the client portal, with no meetings at any stage, which is what keeps the build free. If that rules us out, the honest recommendation is the cheap build, with your eyes open about what it excludes.