2 calculators that name every business they took a number from.
One prices building a website. The other prices keeping the one you already own for another 12 months. What they share is the only property that makes a calculator worth opening: every figure inside them names the business it belongs to, quotes what that business published, links the page and records the day we read it. Neither of them asks for your email address.
Which of these 2 calculators do I need?
If you are collecting quotes to build or replace a website, use the website cost calculator. If you already own a site, it is doing its job and you are not replacing it, use the maintenance calculator, which prices the upkeep for the next 12 months. The division is deliberate: 1 tool prices the build, 1 tool prices keeping it running, and neither pretends to do the other job. Both hand you the figure on the page, with no form standing in front of it.
2 tools, and the question each one is built for.
Between them they rest on 33 prices published by named Australian businesses on their own websites. Each entry below says what its tool prices, what evidence sits underneath it, and the day that evidence was gathered.
Website Cost Calculator (Australia, 2026)
Use it when: I am collecting quotes to build or replace a website, and they are thousands of dollars apart. What should this actually cost?
Prices what BUILDING a website costs. Answer 7 questions about scope, who writes the words, who takes the photos, whether you sell online and what the site has to talk to, and it returns an upfront range, an ongoing range and a 12-month total.
What it rests on: 7 Australian builders that publish a build price on their own websites, read 3 August 2026, plus the recurring costs re-read on 18 August 2026. Every band the model assumed rather than sourced is printed on the page and marked as an assumption, because nobody in Australia publishes what copywriting or photography costs inside a build.
What website maintenance actually costs in Australia
Use it when: I already have a website and it is doing its job. What am I signing up for over the next 12 months, and is any of it more than it should be?
Prices KEEPING a website you already own, for the next 12 months. Care plan against hourly work, hosting, the .com.au renewal, and the changes you genuinely asked for last year. It subtracts a line when your plan already covers it rather than counting it twice.
What it rests on: 9 Australian care plan providers, 3 hosts, 2 registrars and 6 published hourly rates, all read on 18 August 2026, with GST normalised in both directions and standing rates used in place of first-invoice promotions. The businesses that publish no price at all are named too, because that is a finding rather than a gap.
A calculator is worth exactly what its numbers can be traced to.
A calculator is a presentation layer sitting on top of a set of figures. Leave the interface exactly as it is and quietly replace those figures with invented ones, and it will feel just as authoritative, because the arithmetic still adds up and the result still looks specific. Confidence is free to manufacture. So the only question worth asking about any of these, ours included, is where the numbers came from and whether you are able to go and look.
Every figure in both tools carries 4 things, and it carries them in the open rather than in a footnote at the bottom.
The name of the business
Not a category, not a region, not an unnamed agency somebody spoke to. The trading name, so you know who you are being told about.
The wording they published
Their sentence, carried across as they wrote it, rather than our summary of what we think it means. Summaries are where a price quietly becomes a different price.
A link to the page it sits on
Every source row links out. If a figure has moved since we read it, opening 1 tab is enough to catch us at it.
The date we read it
Prices move, and a figure with no date has no shelf life. Several of the pages competing on these searches still carry 2023 in the title. The upkeep set was read on 18 August 2026.
That rule costs us something every time it is applied, which is how you can tell it is doing any work. It forces the build tool to label 9 of its 15 bands as ours rather than as anybody’s published price, because no Australian provider itemises what the writing or the photography costs inside a build. It forces the upkeep tool to name 8 businesses that publish no price at all, which is embarrassing for the category and does nothing for us. It also stops either tool reaching for the phrase that would make both problems disappear, which is the industry average, a number with no author and therefore no way of being wrong.
The last part of the same discipline is that both models are allowed to disagree with us, and a script fails the build when they lose that ability. The upkeep model has to keep reaching "keep the site you have, it is cheaper than replacing it" across most of what a reader can select. The build model has to keep reaching a total that sits below our own $3,564 across 12 months. A tool that can only ever arrive at our own price is not a calculator. It is a brochure doing sums.
The 2 ways a calculator avoids answering the question.
Once you start opening the pages behind these searches rather than reading their search results, the same 2 evasions turn up over and over. Both are worth being able to recognise before you click, because between them they cover almost everything competing here.
1. The range that belongs to nobody.
A page sets out a wide band for a small business website, or for looking after one, and names not a single business at either end. The band is often not even wrong. It is simply unfalsifiable, which is the entire appeal of it: a figure belonging to nobody cannot be checked, and it cannot embarrass anybody either. Here are 3 Australian examples, all read on 18 August 2026, and all of them selling the exact work they decline to price.
- Planted Web Design. An entire page about what upkeep costs, assembled from general ranges, with no price published for the work it sells.
- Spark Interact. Runs 10 separate industry ranges down a single page and never sets a figure of its own beside any of them.
- WP Copilot. A pricing section that renders no figure, above a /pricing/ address that returns a 404.
Naming them is not a cheap shot, it is the only way to make the claim checkable. The same 3 clicks that confirm this paragraph would confirm or destroy an equivalent claim about us, which is the arrangement we want.
2. The number that costs you your contact details.
The second move keeps the arithmetic and relocates the answer behind a form. You hand over a name, an email address and a phone number, and what comes back is not the figure, it is a salesperson with the figure. This is not confined to calculators. It is how a large part of this category prices everything it sells.
- ComKey Consulting. General tiers on the page, then a Get Pricing popup standing where the only number that would have been theirs should be.
- Melbourne IT. Publishes what a domain costs to register, then states that the renewal price becomes visible once you log in to an account.
- Synergy Wholesale. Advertises competitive pricing in Australian dollars, and puts a Request Pricing form in the space the price would occupy.
There is a reliable tell for this one. When the button says Get Pricing rather than showing pricing, the page has a number and has decided you have not earned it yet.
If you find an Australian website calculator that names its providers, links them, dates them, and still hands you the result without asking who you are, send it to us and we will link it from this page. We went looking for one before building these, and did not find it. That absence is most of the reason both of them exist.
Neither of these asks for an email address.
No email field on either tool. No name field, no phone field, no result that unlocks once you identify yourself. Answer the questions, read the figure, close the tab. Nothing you select is stored anywhere and nothing is sent to us.
Half of the reasoning is principle. A figure you have to trade a phone number for is not an answer to your question, it is a quote request wearing the costume of one, and every business in this industry will already give you a quote request. The reason anybody opens a calculator in the first place is to think about the decision privately, before speaking to a single supplier.
The other half is self-interest, and it is worth admitting. A figure locked behind a form cannot be screenshotted and taken back to whoever quoted you, cannot be pasted into an email to a business partner, and cannot be repeated by anything that reads this page on somebody else’s behalf. Withholding the number would cost us more than collecting the address is worth.
Which one you want comes down to 1 question.
Are you buying a website, or are you keeping one? Almost everybody knows the answer before they arrive, and it decides which of the 2 is any use to you.
You do not have a site yet, or you are replacing the one you have
The cost calculatorThis is the quotes situation: 2 or 3 numbers thousands of dollars apart, describing jobs that are not the same job. That tool prices the build and gives you 1 independent range to hold every quote against.
You already have a site, it works, and you are keeping it
The maintenance calculatorThis is the invoice situation: a care plan, a hosting bill, a domain renewal and a few hours of changes, none of which arrive on the same day or from the same company. That tool totals the next 12 months of it and tells you plainly when keeping what you have is the cheaper answer, which for most readers it is.
You have a site, it is not bringing in work, and you are stuck between fixing and starting again
Both, in that orderPrice the upkeep first, because that is the number you are already committed to. Then price the build, because that is the number you would be swapping it for. The decision is rarely about which is cheaper. It is about whether the site has produced anything at all in the last 90 days.
There is a 4th situation neither tool covers, and it is worth saying so. If what you want is the whole picture at once, the build price spread out alongside everything that recurs, that is a different question and it is answered in the article written for it, not here. The tools were kept narrow on purpose, because a calculator that answers 3 questions at once answers none of them well.
Why there are 2 of these and not 20.
A calculator is the easiest thing on a website to mass-produce. Take the model, change the labels, swap the vertical, republish. There is an obvious version of this page listing 20 of them: 1 for plumbers, 1 for cafes, 1 for each capital city, every one of them running identical arithmetic underneath different nouns. Anybody who has built 1 could build the other 19.
We know precisely how that ends, because we did it with pages rather than tools. In August 2026 this site deleted 51 of its own URLs, all of them generated from templates and near-identical to each other once you read the rendered text. The plan predicted a dip in traffic while Google digested the change. There was no dip: across the 13 days either side, impressions went from 93.2 a day to 234.7 a day. The templated pages had not been adding anything. They had been sitting on top of the pages that were.
So the bar for a third tool is the bar these 2 cleared. A model where every figure names the business it belongs to, and a gate that fails the build the moment that model can no longer disagree with us. Nothing else has cleared it, so there is nothing else on this page. The longer written arguments behind both tools, and the reasoning we could not fit into a set of dropdowns, are in the blog.
The numbers behind the numbers.
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