You ask three people what a website costs and get $300, $1,490 and $12,000. All three are real prices for real work, and the gap between them isn't a rort. It's four different products sold under the same name.
Here's what each band buys and what it costs after the build. The studio sits in one of them, and it isn't the right band for everyone.
Building it yourself costs about $30 a month plus your weekends
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy and Shopify all sell you a template and an editor. Budget roughly $20 to $40 a month on an annual plan, plus a domain, and check today's price because they move.
The money isn't the real cost. A first site takes most people twenty to forty hours, spread over evenings, and hour six goes on choosing a font. If you charge out at $90 an hour, that's not a free website.
Do it yourself anyway when cash is tighter than time, or when you want to test whether a website changes anything before you commit. Keep it to four pages, put your phone number in the header, write your suburbs out in text, use your own job photos, and you'll have something that works. Plenty of tradies from Nelligen to Tuross Head run perfectly good DIY sites, and if that's you, put the money into your Google Business Profile instead.
The $300 marketplace build is real, and what goes wrong is predictable
You can get a site built for a few hundred dollars on Fiverr, Airtasker or an offshore marketplace, and sometimes you get a tidy template fill for it.
What goes wrong is usually the same list. The domain and hosting end up in the builder's account instead of yours. The build is a stock theme with twenty plugins bolted on, which is what breaks a year later. The copy comes from someone who's never seen a switchboard and doesn't know Batehaven from Broulee, so your service area page reads like it was translated. Nobody sets up your Google Business Profile, which is the thing that would have brought calls in. When it breaks in month fourteen, there's no one to ring.
It's a reasonable buy under two conditions. Register the domain yourself first, in your own name, and treat the result as a placeholder. If you're paying $300 and expecting to rank in Moruya, the rebuild will cost you more than doing it once.
A local sole operator runs about $1,000 to $3,500, and I'm one of them
This band is one person working locally on a small site, and it's what most trades businesses actually want. Here's the studio's published ladder, to hold against whatever else you're quoted.
- LAUNCH, $1,490. Up to four pages, mobile first, contact form, click to call, Google Business Profile setup, basic on page SEO. Live seven days from deposit and content. Two revision rounds.
- GROWTH, $2,990. Up to eight pages, copywriting included, photo sourcing, service area pages, review integration, analytics. Fourteen days. Two revision rounds.
- COMMERCE, $4,990. An online shop, for selling products rather than booking jobs.
- BRAND KIT, $890. Logo, colours, type, a one page brand guide, business card.
- CARE BASIC, $89 a month, or CARE PLUS at $179 a month, covering hosting, updates, backups and small changes.
Terms are 50% deposit before work starts, balance before the site goes live, ownership transferring to you on final payment, and revisions past the included two at $95 an hour. No GST is added, because the studio isn't registered for it.
The honest downside of this band is that it's one person. If he's booked, you wait. If he's crook, you wait. There's no support desk at 9pm and no second designer to hand your job to. A sole operator is also the wrong call for a 300 product catalogue or a four-branch business.
The studio is new, so there's no long client list to point at here. Judge it on what you can check: the prices are published instead of hidden behind a form, the timeline is written down, ownership transfers to you, and the phone gets answered.
An agency starts around $8,000, and some jobs genuinely need one
Agencies quote from about $8,000 and go a long way past it. You're buying a team: a designer, a developer and a project manager who chases everyone, plus cover when one is on leave.
That's worth real money when you've got multiple locations, a large product catalogue, ad spend to manage against the site, or several people who need to sign things off. For a one-van plumber in Batehaven, you'd be paying for a process you don't need.
The costs nobody puts in the quote
The build is a one-off. These aren't.
- A .com.au domain runs about $20 to $40 a year. Keep it in your own name.
- Hosting is roughly $10 to $30 a month, sometimes bundled into a build.
- SSL, the padlock in the address bar, is free through Let's Encrypt and should be included. If someone bills you $150 a year for it, ask what you're getting.
- Updates, backups and security patches are either your Sunday afternoon or a care plan.
- Content changes are either included in a plan or charged by the hour.
Add it up over five years and the running costs often pass the build cost. That's not a reason to avoid them. It's a reason to know the number before you sign.
The question that decides more than price is who owns it
Ask this before you pay a deposit. Is the domain registered in my name and my email address? Will I have the hosting login? Will I be the owner of the Google Business Profile, with you as a manager? Do the files and the design become mine once it's paid off?
A builder who answers yes to all four is selling you an asset. One who hesitates is selling you a rental, and the rebuild cost when you leave is the real price of that job.
How to pick your band
No website and no spare cash: fix your Google Business Profile first, then build four DIY pages. Steady work and you want the phone ringing from search: that's the sole operator band. Selling at volume or running ads: talk to an agency.
If you want a second opinion on a quote you've already got, send it through with the suburbs you cover and I'll tell you which band it belongs in, even when the answer is that you should do it yourself.