If you ask five Australian studios what a website costs, you will get five different answers, and all of them can be right. The honest reply is that price follows scope. A one-page site for a sole trader and a booking platform for a clinic are both 'websites', but they are not the same job.
So this is not a price list. It is a plain explanation of what actually moves the number in 2026, written from the point of view of a studio that quotes this work every week. We build custom sites and web apps, and we also work with WordPress when that is the sensible choice, so we have no reason to push you toward the most expensive option.
We are based in Hobart and work with businesses right across Australia, mostly remotely. Below is how we think about cost, with realistic ranges you can use to sanity-check any quote you receive.
Why there is no single price
Scope is the whole story. The number of pages, the amount of custom design, whether anything connects to another system, whether someone writes the words for you, and how much of the build is bespoke rather than off the shelf. Change any of those and the price moves. Two quotes that look far apart are often just describing two different projects.
This is also why a fixed menu of packages can mislead you. A tidy list of Bronze, Silver and Gold looks reassuring, but real briefs rarely fit neatly into a tier. You either pay for things you do not need, or you find the one thing you do need sitting in the next tier up.
We quote per project because that is the honest way to price work that varies this much. We look at what you are trying to achieve, then scope it. If a simple build genuinely covers it, we say so. You can see the shape of how we structure ongoing work on our packages page, but the build itself is always quoted against your actual brief.
Brochure site, lead-gen site, or web app
The single biggest driver of cost is what the site is for. Roughly, projects fall into three groups, and the gap between them is large.
A brochure site presents your business. A few pages, your services, some photos, a contact form. For a small Australian business this often sits somewhere between a few thousand and around ten thousand dollars, depending on page count, design and who writes the content. A capable freelancer can come in lower. A studio with designers and copywriters will sit higher, and you are paying for the extra hands.
A lead-generation site does a job. It is built to turn visitors into enquiries or bookings, with structured landing pages, considered copy, tracking, and sometimes a CRM or email tool wired in. That work commonly runs from around ten thousand into the mid twenties, because there is more thinking, more pages, and more moving parts than a brochure site.
A web application is software that happens to run in a browser. Portals, dashboards, booking systems, membership areas, anything with logins and data. This is a different category of build and usually starts in the tens of thousands and climbs from there, because you are commissioning a custom system, not a set of pages. Our own product Cargonio, a freight ERP, and the e-learning platforms we run for clients live in this bracket. If that is what you need, the web development work is closer to engineering than to design.
Custom code, WordPress, or a template builder
How the site is built matters as much as what it does. There are three broad routes, and each suits a different situation.
A template or builder, such as Wix, Squarespace or a Shopify theme, is the cheapest way to get online. A subscription of maybe twenty to fifty dollars a month, and you do much of the work yourself. It is a fair choice for a very small business testing an idea. The trade-off is limited control, performance that is hard to tune, and a ceiling you eventually hit.
WordPress sits in the middle and still runs a large share of Australian small-business sites. It is flexible, there are people everywhere who can maintain it, and content is easy to update. The costs to watch are plugins, hosting, and the maintenance a WordPress site quietly needs to stay secure. We build on WordPress when it genuinely fits the brief, and we say so rather than upselling.
Custom code is the route when performance, a specific workflow, or a system that has to grow are the priority. It costs more up front because it is built for you, but you own it outright, it carries no plugin bloat, and it is fast. Our own site scores in the high nineties on Google Lighthouse, which is hard to reach on a stack of third-party plugins. The right answer depends on your goals, not on what any one studio prefers to sell.
What pushes the number up or down
Within any of those categories, a handful of factors move the final figure. Knowing them helps you read a quote.
Pages and content. Ten pages cost more than four. And if you need someone to write the copy, that is real work with a real cost. Supplying your own text, photos and logos lowers the price. Asking the studio to produce all of it raises it.
Design and integrations. A bespoke design costs more than adapting a proven layout. Connecting the site to other systems, a payment gateway, a booking tool, an accounting package, a CRM, adds time for each connection. So does migrating content off an old site, especially when the old data is messy.
Timeline and revisions. A rushed deadline costs more, because it reshuffles other work. Open-ended rounds of changes also add up. A clear brief and prompt feedback are the two cheapest things a client can bring to a project, and they genuinely lower the total.
SEO foundations and being found
A site that no one finds is an expensive brochure. Some search-engine basics belong in the build itself: clean markup, fast pages, a sensible page structure, titles and descriptions, a sitemap, and a mobile layout that works. Any competent build should include these, and you should ask whether yours does.
Ranking over time is separate work. Competing for search terms in a real Australian market, publishing content, earning links and improving pages month to month is an ongoing effort, not a one-off setting. It is worth separating the build cost from the marketing cost in your head, because they are two different budgets.
Our SEO plans start at AUD $990 per month, month to month, with no lock-in contract. We keep it that way on purpose. If the work is not paying off, you should be free to stop, and that keeps the pressure on us to show results rather than trap you in a term.
The ongoing costs people forget
The build is a one-off. Running the site is not, and the ongoing costs are where budgets quietly slip.
Expect a domain, roughly fifteen to forty dollars a year for a .com.au. Hosting, from a few dollars a month for a small static site up to more meaningful sums for an application under load. An SSL certificate, usually included with decent hosting now. These are small but constant.
Then maintenance. Software needs updates, backups need to run, security needs watching, and content needs refreshing. A static custom site needs very little. A WordPress site with plugins needs regular attention or it drifts into risk. Budget for this from the start rather than discovering it after launch, and be wary of any quote that pretends it does not exist.
How we quote, and what to send us
We start with a short conversation about what the site is for and what success looks like, then we scope and quote against that. No fixed menu, because your project is not a menu item. If a lean build covers it, we will tell you, even when a bigger number would suit us better.
We work remotely from our Hobart base and take on projects across Australia. A lot of our clients are in Melbourne and Sydney, and we run those jobs the same way we run every job, over calls and shared documents, with a trip across when a project needs face-to-face time. Clients keep full ownership of everything we build, code and content, with nothing held hostage.
If you want a real figure for your specific site rather than a range, the fastest path is to tell us what you are trying to do. You can get in touch with a rough brief, and we will come back with honest scope and a price, or a straight answer that a template would serve you better.