Notes — 06 · August 2026
What should a website cost?
In Australia, in 2026: a DIY builder costs $200 to $800 a year plus your evenings, a template build from a freelancer runs about $1,500 to $3,000, and a custom website, designed and built for one business, starts at $4,500 here and is quoted as a fixed number before any work begins. That is the answer. The rest of this note is why it is so hard to get a straight one.
Search this question and you will find a dozen guides written by studios. I read them so you do not have to, and they agree on almost nothing except the shape of the answer: a range. Three thousand to one hundred and fifty thousand. Two hundred to eight thousand. Five to twenty five. Every one of those numbers is technically defensible, and not one of them helps you, because a range that wide is not a price. It is a refusal to name one.
Why everyone quotes a range
Partly because websites genuinely vary. A five page site for a local firm and an ecommerce platform with four hundred products are different jobs, and no honest person prices them the same.
But mostly because a range is safe for the person publishing it. It gets you onto the phone, where the real number can be shaped to what you seem able to pay. The width of the range is the width of the negotiation they are leaving themselves. When a studio publishes $5,000 to $25,000, they are not describing the work. They are describing you, before they have met you.
I publish fixed prices instead. Not because my costs are more predictable than anyone else's, but because the alternative quietly moves all the risk onto the client. An hourly rate is a taxi meter you cannot see from the back seat. A fixed price means the estimating mistake, when it happens, is mine to absorb. That is where it belongs, because I am the one with the information to estimate.
is where a custom build starts here: one website, designed and built end to end for one business, nothing templated and nothing reused, the full number agreed before a line of code is written.
Current prices are always on the pricing page, in the open.
The actual price list
So this note does not do the thing it is complaining about, here are mine, in full:
"From" means the smallest version of that engagement, not a teaser. Every project is quoted as one fixed number before it begins, and that number does not move unless the scope does.
What actually moves the number
Four things, and none of them is the number of pages.
Whether the brand underneath is settled. If your logo, positioning and messaging are wrong, a new website is an expensive way to say the wrong thing beautifully. Fixing that first is the difference between the two build tiers above.
What has to be built rather than assembled. Template sites are cheap because the decisions were made once and sold many times. Custom costs more because every decision is made for you alone. That is not a surcharge for vanity. It is the entire reason a stranger looking at your site sees your business instead of a theme they half-recognise.
Motion and 3D. Real-time 3D in a browser is genuinely expensive to do well, which is why it is priced by scope and lives in the top tier. It is also the single fastest way to look unlike everyone else, because almost nobody in the small-business market can do it.
Who carries the risk. Hourly billing is cheaper on paper and routinely dearer in practice, because the meter runs on revisions, and revisions are decided by the person not paying for them. A fixed price is sometimes the larger printed number and almost always the smaller final one.
Questions people actually ask
How much does a website cost for a small business?
If the business lives on referrals and reputation, between $4,500 and $12,000, once, done properly. If the site only needs to exist as an address on a card, a $300-a-year builder does that job and I will tell you so in the audit.
What is a fair price to pay?
A fixed one. Whatever studio you use, the test is simple: do you know the full number before work begins, and does it hold. If the answer is a rate per hour, you are the one holding the risk.
How much does a redesign cost?
The same as a new build, because done properly it is one. Keeping the old structure is how the old problems survive. Mine start from $4,500, and start with the complimentary audit so the quote is built against what actually needs to change.
Why do quotes vary so wildly between studios?
Because you are quoted on different things: their overhead, their guess about your budget, and how much of the work is reused from the last client. The wider the published range, the more of the price is decided after they have met you.
The honest way to find out what yours should cost is to start with what you have. I read it the way a stranger would and put it in writing, two minutes to ask for, no charge, and the answer is sometimes that you should not spend anything yet.