Website cost calculator for Australian businesses.
Answer 7 questions and get an upfront range, a monthly range and a 12-month total, anchored to prices that named Australian providers publish on their own websites. It shows its working, it marks every band we assumed rather than sourced, it does not ask for your email, and when a cheaper option than ours exists it names the gap.
How much does a website cost in Australia?
A small business website in Australia is quoted from $250 to more than $10,000 upfront, with the busiest price point at $995. Agencies quote $3,000 to $10,000 upfront plus $500 to $2,000 a month. Over a full 12 months a typical 6 to 12 page site lands between $1,595 and $8,100, hosting and changes included.
Run your own numbers before you read ours.
Answer 7 questions and it returns 3 figures: an upfront range, a monthly range, and what the 2 of them come to across 12 months. It shows its working, so you can see which of your answers moved the estimate and by how much. Nothing is stored, nothing is emailed, and there is no result hiding behind a form.
The 7 things that move a quote
Change any answer and the figures update as you go. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Your estimate
Estimate: $1,355 to $7,740 across the first 12 months. Upfront $995 to $6,000, then $30 to $145 a month. That range straddles our total.
Upfront cost plus 12 months of the ongoing cost.
The high end adds every line at its maximum at once, which is close to no real quote. It also double counts: the published all-in prices of $5,600 (Tradie Web Guys) and $7,500 (WebApex) already contain copy and launch setup that this model adds as separate lines. Read the top of a wide range as a ceiling, and the width itself as a sign your scope is not settled yet.
That range straddles our total.
At the low end a quote comes in $2,209 under our $3,564 total. At the high end it sits $4,176 above it. Where you actually land depends on who quotes and what they include.
Show the working
- Base build, 6-12 pages$995 to $6,000
- Upfront total$995 to $6,000
- Hosting, per month$10 to $50
- Changes for a 6-12 page site, spread monthly, per month$20 to $95
- Ongoing, per month$30 to $145
The headline number is the upfront total plus 12 months of the ongoing total. Of the lines above, hosting and any ongoing SEO retainer are published prices. The rest are stated assumptions, each one listed with its reasoning further down this page.
Our side of the comparison: no upfront cost, then $297 a month including GST on a 12-month subscription, which is $3,564 in total.
This is an estimate, not a quote. The base bands and the recurring costs are anchored to prices Australian providers publish openly, read on 3 August 2026. The 6 adders are our stated assumptions, because no provider publishes a price for them, and each one is listed with its reasoning further down this page. No email is asked for, and the answer does not change if you give one.
What actually moves a website quote.
A quote is not a price list. It is somebody estimating hours, then adding a margin for the parts of the job they cannot see yet. The 7 questions above are the 7 places those unseen hours hide, and each one moves a price through a different mechanism. Understand the mechanism and you can argue with the quote instead of just flinching at it.
A rebuild is not the cheaper option, and people expect it to be.
Nothing about the design gets faster because an old site exists. What a rebuild adds is the work nobody itemises: deciding the fate of every address that already exists. Pages earning impressions have to keep earning them, pages earning nothing have to be retired without leaving a hole behind them, and every old address needs somewhere to land. So the model adds up to $1,500 for a rebuild instead of taking anything off.
This site went through exactly that: 90 URLs became 36, and 49 of the original 90 had never served a single Google impression. Removing them was the entire point, and the mapping was most of the job.
Page count is not a design question. It is how many things you sell.
A page is a search target. So the useful version of the question is: how many separate things do you want to be found for? A 5-page site holds a home page, an about, a contact and 2 services, which is 2 things. A 12-page site holds 8 or 9 of them.
That is why the base range climbs from $250 to $2,500 in the smallest band and $995 to $6,000 in the next one. You are buying coverage, not layout. Choosing a page count before choosing what you want to be found for is how a business ends up paying for 6 pages nobody searches.
Copy is the line most often left out, and it is a scheduling problem.
Whoever builds the site can predict how many hours a design takes, because they control every one of those hours. Nobody can predict how long it takes a business owner to describe their own business. So copy leaves the scope quietly and becomes your homework.
Priced in, it is $600 to $4,000 on a small business site. Priced out, it is the most common reason a build sits at 80% finished while everyone waits on 1 service page. If a quote does not mention copywriting, assume it is excluded, then ask in writing.
Photography is excluded even more often, and it shows.
The band is $400 to $2,500 for a small shoot. It matters more than the money suggests, because stock photography is the clearest signal available that a website is a template with a name dropped into it.
A visitor cannot audit your workmanship, so they audit the evidence in front of them, and a stock photo of a smiling stranger in a hard hat points the wrong way. Photos from your own phone, on your own jobs, beat bought ones almost every time.
The jump in store pricing is not product count.
It is the number of ways money and stock can move. Selling 1 product at 1 price with 1 postage rate is a weekend of setup, and the model puts that at $800 to $4,000.
Add variants, tiered shipping, a payment method that is not a card, or stock that has to stay in agreement with a point-of-sale system, and it becomes $3,000 to $15,000. Each of those is a rule somebody has to write, then test against every way it can fail.
Integrations split into 2 kinds, and only 1 of them is coding.
Standard means the other system publishes a documented, maintained way in: a booking widget, a mailing list, a CRM that accepts form submissions. That is $300 to $2,000 and most of it is configuration.
Custom means the other system was built for 1 company and has no public way in. The expensive part is not writing the code, it is the discovery: working out what that system will accept, often from somebody who no longer works there. That is why the band runs to $12,000.
SEO included means at least 4 different things.
The gap between them is thousands of dollars, so this is the single most useful question you can put to a supplier in writing.
- The build is technically sound. Fast, crawlable, works on a phone. That is a competent build. It is not SEO and it should not be a line item.
- On-page setup at launch. Page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, schema, an XML sitemap, Search Console verified. A real one-time job at $500 to $3,000, and once it is done it is done.
- A page plan. Deciding which searches the site is built to win, before anybody opens a design tool. The most valuable version and the least often included, because it happens before the quote exists.
- An ongoing campaign. New pages, content, earned links, monthly reporting. That is $500 to $2,000 a month in Australia. It is a retainer, not an inclusion.
A quote that says SEO included and means the first one is not lying to you. It is also not selling you SEO. Ask which number it is.
The published prices this calculator is built on.
A calculator is worth exactly what the numbers inside it are worth, and most of them return a figure that traces back to nothing, which is why they can be so confident. Here is every price this one is built on, from an Australian provider that publishes it on its own website, read on 3 August 2026.
Note what is not in the table: copywriting, photography, stores, integrations and launch SEO setup. Nobody publishes a price for those, because the published prices bundle them. The bands the calculator uses for them are therefore our assumptions, not sourced figures, and the next section lists every one of them so you can disagree with the specific number rather than the tool.
Prices move, so the check date sits in the open rather than in a footnote. Several of the pages competing for this query still carry 2023 in their titles.
| Provider | Published price | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Lime Virtual Studio | $250 to $1,500 | A published 3-tier price ladder, cheapest entry point we found. |
| Havealook | $995 | Flat published build price, Australian made angle. |
| Cheap Websites | $995 | Exact-match domain, same flat price point. |
| Katipo Web | From $1,295 | Price carried in the page title, so it is the lead argument. |
| Design Mojo | $500 to $5,000 | 4-tier ladder from a single-page site to a large build. |
| Tradie Web Guys | $5,600 | Trade specialist, published rather than quoted on enquiry. |
| WebApex | $7,500 | Their published figure for trades and construction work. |
| Typical agency shape | $3,000 to $10,000 upfront, then $500 to $2,000 a month | The pattern across the agency quotes we reviewed. |
The 2 recurring bands come from the same review: managed Australian hosting at $120 to $600 a year, and edit work at $80 to $250 an hour. The full tier-by-tier version of this table lives on what a website costs.
Every band in the calculator, and where it came from.
Publishing this is the cost of publishing the tool. Of the 15 bands the calculator runs on, 9 are our assumptions rather than a price somebody published. That is not a flaw we are confessing, it is how the category works: the published prices are all-in figures, so nobody itemises what copy or photography costs inside them.
What we can do is refuse to launder an assumption into a fact. Each line below says which it is, and the reasoning sits next to the number so you can argue with the specific figure.
| Line | Figure | Basis | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base build, 1 to 5 pages | $250 to $2,500 | Anchored | The $250 is Lime Virtual Studio's published floor. The $2,500 is our assumption, sitting between Katipo Web's from-$1,295 and the middle of Design Mojo's published ladder. |
| Base build, 6 to 12 pages | $995 to $6,000 | Anchored | The $995 is published flat by Havealook and by Cheap Websites. The $6,000 is our assumption, between the published $5,600 and $7,500 all-in prices and inside the $3,000 to $10,000 agency shape. |
| Base build, 13 to 25 pages | $2,500 to $10,000 | Anchored | The $10,000 is the published top of the typical agency shape. The $2,500 is our assumption: a volume builder doing more pages should still undercut an agency doing fewer. |
| Base build, 26 or more pages | $5,000 to $18,000 | Assumption | The weakest line in the model, and the only figure above the source set, which stops at $10,000. Nothing we found publishes a price for a build this size. Treat any result using this band as indicative. |
| Rebuild rather than new | Adds $0 to $1,500 | Assumption | No provider publishes a migration price. The direction is evidenced by our own rebuild (90 URLs to 36, 49 of the original 90 with no Google impression ever). The size of the number is our estimate. |
| Copywriting, if they write it | Adds $600 to $4,000 | Assumption | The published all-in prices bundle copy rather than itemise it, so there is nothing to quote. Our band assumes a small business site priced per page, not a brand project. |
| Photography, if it needs sourcing | Adds $400 to $2,500 | Assumption | Same position: no published figure exists in the source set. Our band assumes a short local shoot. |
| Simple online store | Adds $800 to $4,000 | Assumption | No provider in the source set publishes a store price. Assumes a handful of products, 1 postage rate and card payment only. |
| Complex online store | Adds $3,000 to $15,000 | Assumption | Unpublished, and the top sits above the entire source set. Assumes variants, tiered shipping and stock that has to agree with a point-of-sale system. |
| Standard integrations | Adds $300 to $2,000 | Assumption | Unpublished. Assumes the other system has a documented, maintained way in, so most of the work is configuration. |
| Custom integrations | Adds $1,500 to $12,000 | Assumption | Unpublished, and the top sits above the entire source set. Assumes discovery work against a system built for 1 company with no public way in. |
| SEO set up at build | Adds $500 to $3,000 | Assumption | The source set publishes a monthly retainer, not a one-off launch setup fee. Choosing an ongoing campaign charges this once and the retainer monthly, which is how retainers are usually sold. |
| Hosting | $10 to $50 a month | Published | The published $120 to $600 a year band for managed Australian hosting, divided by 12. |
| Changes after launch | $40 to $125 a month | Derived | The hourly rate is the published $80 to $250. The volume, 6 billable hours a year, is our assumption. So $480 a year is $40 a month and $1,500 a year is $125 a month. |
| Ongoing SEO retainer | $500 to $2,000 a month | Published | The published monthly range for a full-service Australian agency, used unchanged. |
The one thing a calculator like this always gets wrong.
It adds every high to every other high. A result of $2,695 to $15,100 does not mean $15,100 is a likely outcome, it means $15,100 is what you get if all 6 lines land at their worst at the same time, which is close to no real quote. Worse, it double counts: the published $5,600 from Tradie Web Guys and $7,500 from WebApex are all-in prices that already contain copy and launch setup, and this model adds those on top as separate lines.
That error runs in exactly one direction: it inflates what somebody else looks like they will charge you, which flatters us. We have left the arithmetic visible rather than quietly damping it, because a hidden correction is worse than a stated one. Read the low end as the realistic figure for a well-scoped job, the high end as a ceiling, and the width of the gap as a measure of how undecided your scope still is.
The 5 costs that arrive after the quote.
The calculator models what somebody will quote you. There are 5 costs that turn up afterwards, and it can only put an honest number on 2 of them. Knowing which 2 is the difference between a budget and a surprise.
Changes after launch
In the modelThe model assumes 6 change requests a year at the published $80 to $250 an hour, spread across 12 months, which is $40 to $125 a month. That is deliberately light; most businesses want more. On a one-off build the number that decides your year is not the hourly rate, it is who gets to rule on whether your request is a change or a new job.
Hosting
In the model$10 to $50 a month, from the published $120 to $600 a year band for managed Australian hosting. It is the recurring cost everybody remembers, and the one that matters least.
Whether it worked
Cannot be modelledCall tracking, form tracking and an analytics property that has been configured rather than merely installed. This is what lets you answer, at renewal, whether the site paid for itself. It is missing from most build quotes because a quote is written to be compared on launch day, and on launch day it is invisible.
Year 2
Cannot be modelledDomains, hosting, plugin and theme licences, form services and security subscriptions all come up together, usually above the first-year rate. A build quote covers a build. Renewals are next year’s problem by design, and no calculator that stops at 12 months can honestly price them.
The exit
Cannot be modelledThe dearest item here and the only one that never appears on a quote at all. Before you sign, get it in writing: who the domain is registered to, who holds the hosting login, where the code lives, and whether the analytics history travels with you. A site assembled inside a platform nobody else can open does not really transfer, whatever the contract says.
How to compare 2 quotes that look nothing alike.
Quotes for the same website routinely arrive $6,000 apart and describe genuinely different jobs. Comparing the build prices tells you almost nothing about which one is better value. Run this instead, using the calculator above as the common denominator.
Write each quote as 2 numbers, not 1
Every quote has an upfront figure and a recurring figure, even when the recurring one is only implied. A quote that names no monthly cost is not a quote with no monthly cost, it is a quote where that number is unstated. Write both down for each supplier and put a question mark wherever one is missing, because the question marks are the comparison.
Set the calculator once and leave it alone
Answer the 7 questions for the site you actually want, not for whatever each quote happens to describe. That gives you 1 independent range to hold both quotes against. Anything sitting well outside it is not automatically wrong, but it is now a specific question: what is in yours that is not in this?
Toggle the excluded lines back on, one quote at a time
This is the step that does the work. If supplier A includes copywriting and supplier B does not, switch copy to them and read how far the estimate moves. That movement is roughly what supplier B has left sitting on your desk. Repeat for photography and for SEO. Quotes that looked $6,000 apart stop looking $6,000 apart very quickly.
Multiply the monthly by 12, add the upfront, compare only those 2 totals
Build prices are the least informative number either party will show you, and the one both of them want you to focus on. The 12-month total is what actually leaves your account before the site has had a year to do anything for you.
Turn whatever gap is left into jobs
Divide the remaining difference by the profit on 1 average job. Now the question is answerable: does the dearer option need to win 2 more jobs a year, or 20? Sometimes that maths makes the expensive quote obviously correct, sometimes the cheap one. Either way you have stopped comparing prices and started comparing returns.
Where our offer sits on this, honestly.
We would rather be inside this comparison than standing next to it. The build costs $0 upfront. Once the site is live it is $297 a month including GST on a 12-month subscription, which is $3,564 in total. That is the total, not a yearly rate, and we do not model it beyond 12 months because we do not ask you to commit beyond 12 months.
Now hold that against the model. A $995 build from a volume builder, plus the lowest running costs in the calculator ($50 a month covering hosting and the occasional paid edit), comes to $1,595 across the same 12 months. That is $1,969 cheaper than we are, and the smallest band in the calculator is cheaper again at $850. Anyone comparing quotes can do that sum in a minute, so there is no version of this page where hiding it helps us.
The tool is built to be able to disagree with us. Answer it for a small brochure site where you write your own copy and supply your own photos, and it returns $370 to $3,520, which sits entirely below our $3,564. It says so in those words. An earlier version of this model could not reach that answer, because a flat change allowance put $1,500 a year into every result and quietly floored every comparison above our own price. That was a bug in our favour, and a script now runs all 864 answer combinations on every build to make sure it does not come back.
What the difference actually buys.
- Hosting, daily backups and security monitoring, with no separate invoice for any of it.
- Changes through the client portal, turned around within 3 business days, with no hourly rate on image swaps, copy edits, new pages and updated pages.
- A site built SEO-ready at launch rather than sold back to you as an extra.
- Live in 5 working days from intake. Miss that and there is no monthly fee for the first 12 months.
- 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.
What it does not buy.
If you set the calculator to any of these, it stops comparing itself to our price and tells you why, because our $3,564 would not buy what you just priced.
- E-commerce setup. If the calculator is showing you a store, it is not showing you us.
- Third-party integrations beyond standard analytics, and custom development beyond minor edits.
- A standalone ongoing SEO campaign. The build is SEO-ready at launch and the monthly fee keeps it running, which is not the same product as a $500 to $2,000 a month retainer.
- Paid advertising management, which is priced separately.
If none of that is worth $1,969 to you across a year, buy the $995 build. That is a real recommendation, not a rhetorical one: plenty of businesses want a credible website they never touch again, and paying monthly for SEO work you have no intention of using is a poor decision. We take 4 builds a month, which is the actual reason the build can be free. It is a capped number funded by the subscription, not a loss leader run at volume. Full terms are on pricing and the guarantee.
Why this does not ask for your email.
Most tools in this category collect an address before they show you the result. We considered it, and here is the reasoning against.
A calculator that withholds its answer is not a calculator. It is a form with arithmetic attached. The moment the figure sits behind an email field, the page stops being the answer to your question and becomes the price of the answer, and you arrived here because you already have a pricing problem.
There is a second reason, less noble and more practical. A gated result never appears in a search result, never gets quoted back by anything summarising this page, and never gets forwarded to somebody else who is collecting quotes. A number we hide does nothing for us either.
So there is no email field, no gated result and no sequence you did not ask for. Run it 6 times, send it to whoever quoted you, use it to argue with us. When you do want to start, the application link at the foot of this page is the whole process: a written agreement in your inbox, then email and the client portal. That is also why the build is free.
Questions about the numbers.
It returns a range, not a quote, and it is only as good as the prices inside it. The base build bands and the recurring costs are anchored to figures published by named Australian providers and read on 3 August 2026: $250 to $1,500 (Lime Virtual Studio), $995 (Havealook and Cheap Websites), from $1,295 (Katipo Web), $500 to $5,000 (Design Mojo), $5,600 (Tradie Web Guys), $7,500 (WebApex), $120 to $600 a year for managed hosting and $500 to $2,000 a month for agency SEO. The bands for copywriting, photography, stores, integrations and launch SEO setup are our stated assumptions, because no provider publishes a price for them separately. The page lists all 15 bands and marks which is which, so you can check our reasoning rather than take our word for it.
Then the tool stops comparing itself to our price. Clause 5 of our agreement puts e-commerce setup, integrations beyond standard analytics, custom development and standalone SEO campaign management outside the monthly fee, so our $3,564 would not buy that scope. Claiming a win there would be comparing 2 different jobs. The estimate still runs and still shows its working, it just declines to score itself against us.
Because the model adds every maximum to every other maximum, and no real quote lands that way. It also double counts: a published all-in price like $5,600 from Tradie Web Guys already contains the copy and launch setup that this model adds as separate lines. That error runs one way, inflating what a competitor looks like they will charge, which flatters us, so it is stated rather than quietly corrected. Read the low end as the realistic figure for a well-scoped job and the high end as a ceiling.
Because a single confident figure for a job nobody has scoped is a guess with better presentation. Any 2 builders quoting the same 8-page site can be $4,000 apart and both be reasonable, depending on who writes the copy, who takes the photos and what happens in month 6. The range is the honest output. The width of it is information too: a wide result means your scope has not been decided yet.
No, and it usually costs slightly more. The design work is identical, and a rebuild adds URL mapping, redirects and migrating content that has to keep whatever rankings it has already earned. The model adds up to $1,500 for that rather than discounting it. Our own rebuild cut 90 URLs to 36, and 49 of the original 90 had never served a single Google impression.
It means at least 4 different things. A technically sound build (which is not SEO). On-page setup at launch: titles, meta descriptions, headings, schema, sitemap, Search Console, typically $500 to $3,000 once. A page plan deciding which searches the site is built to win, which is the most valuable version and the least often included. Or an ongoing campaign, which is $500 to $2,000 a month in Australia and is a retainer. Ask a supplier which of the 4 they mean.
Because it is priced per page far more often than as a fixed fee, and because it is the one part of a build whose hours nobody can predict. The model puts it at $600 to $4,000 for a small business site. When it is excluded the cost does not disappear, it moves to you, and unwritten copy is the most common reason a build stalls at 80% finished.
No. There is no email field, no gated result screen and no follow-up sequence. Run it as many times as you like, screenshot it, and take it to whoever quoted you. A calculator that withholds its answer is a form with arithmetic attached, and you already have a quote problem, which is why you are on this page.
Managed Australian hosting runs $120 to $600 a year. Edits are billed at $80 to $250 an hour by most one-off builders. Ongoing SEO from a full-service agency is $500 to $2,000 a month. Added up, a modest one-off build costs $50 to $175 a month to keep running before any SEO work at all. We charge $297 a month including GST with hosting, backups and changes inside that figure.
If your website has not produced a lead from SEO within the first 90 days of going live, you stop paying the monthly fee until it does. Billing resumes on the first lead. There is no refund of fees already paid, and we do not promise a ranking or a ranking timeframe, because nobody can.
Read these before you sign anything.
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