How much should a small business website cost in Australia?

It’s one of the first questions every local business owner asks, and one of the hardest to get a straight answer to: how much should a website cost? Search around and you’ll find figures from “free” to “$30,000” with no explanation. So let me give you an honest breakdown, Australian dollars, no spin.

A quick warning before the numbers: these are typical ranges, not hard quotes. Every site is different. But they’ll give you a realistic feel for the market.

The three ways to get a website

DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.): roughly $15 to $50 a month in subscription, plus your time. On paper that’s the cheapest option. In practice the real cost is the hours you spend building and maintaining it yourself. If your weekend is worth anything to you, factor that in.

Freelancers: typically low thousands for a small-business site, say $1,500 to $5,000 depending on how much is involved. You usually get something custom and decent. The catch is what happens after launch, which I’ll come to.

Agencies: often $5,000 to $20,000 and up. For that you get a team, a process and polish. But agencies are generally set up for bigger clients with bigger budgets, so a small local business can end up paying agency prices for the junior end of their attention.

Again, ranges, not gospel. But notice the gap between the sticker price and the real cost, because that’s where most people get caught out.

The cost everyone forgets

Here’s the thing almost nobody tells you when you’re buying: the build is the cheap part. Keeping it working is the ongoing cost.

A website isn’t a one-off purchase like a sign out the front. It needs:

• Hosting and security: somewhere for it to live, kept patched so it doesn’t get hacked.
• To stay found on Google: search isn’t “set and forget”; it needs ongoing attention.
• Content updates: new offers, photos, hours, prices. A stale site quietly tells customers you’ve closed.
• Fixes and maintenance: links break, forms stop sending, things drift.

Most quotes cover the build and go quiet on all of this. So you pay $3,000, the freelancer disappears, and a year later you’re back to square one with a broken site and no one to call. The upkeep didn’t go away. It just landed on you.

Why “cheap” often costs more

The cheapest option is rarely the cheapest in the end.

A bargain build that nobody maintains stops bringing in enquiries within months. A DIY site eats hundreds of hours of your time that you’ll never get back. A site that’s slow or invisible on Google is costing you customers every single day. You just don’t see the ones who never found you. (More on that in why your website doesn’t show up on Google.)

“Cheap” usually means you pay later, in lost customers or lost weekends. That’s the bit the sticker price hides.

What you should actually pay for

Forget the headline number for a second. Here’s what genuinely matters:

• A site that loads fast on a phone and is easy to use.
• A site that’s set up to be found on Google for what you do locally.
• Someone who’s still there after launch to keep it working and fix what breaks.
• Clear ownership: your files, your domain, your logins, no being held hostage.

If a quote nails those four, the dollar figure is almost secondary. If it ignores them, even a cheap one is poor value.

Where HarryMade sits

I built HarryMade around exactly the gap above: the “what happens after launch” problem. Here’s the deal, in full:

Free rebuild preview. I rebuild your site first, for real, and you only pay if you like it. No risk to look.

$500 one-off to go live. That’s the whole build, online with your domain and content.

$600 a month to keep it working. This covers the upkeep nobody else includes: hosting and security, your Google Business Profile and local search, two content updates a month, fixes based on how real customers actually use the site, and a plain-English monthly report.

No lock-in. Cancel anytime. You own every file and login.

Compare that honestly. A $3,000 freelancer build with no support, versus a $500 build where someone’s actively keeping it found and fast every month. Over a couple of years the second one usually wins on both cost and results, because a maintained site keeps earning.

The honest answer

So, how much should a small business website cost? Enough to get something fast, findable and easy to enquire on, and a sensible ongoing amount to keep it that way. Be very wary of any quote that’s all build and no upkeep.

If you’d like to see what a fast, found, low-fuss version of your site looks like before spending anything, grab a free rebuild preview or book a 15-minute chat and I’ll give you a straight answer for your situation.