How much should a small business website cost in Australia (2026)

Every quote you receive for a small-business website in Australia in 2026 will sit in one of four buckets. The work involved isn’t mysterious — what changes is who’s doing it, and how much margin they’re charging on top.

The four buckets

• DIY builders (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify): $0 setup, $200–$400 per year subscription, plus your weekends.
• Freelance developers: $3,000–$8,000 all-in, with a 50% deposit and a 4–6 week timeline.
• Boutique web studios: $8,000–$25,000 for a five- to eight-page site, 8–14 weeks to live.
• Subscription services (aibuiltmysite, etc.): $44–$107/month AUD, no deposit, draft live in 72 hours.

What you’re really paying for

Roughly 70% of the cost on any traditional build is project management, sales calls, scope tennis, and rework cycles. The actual time spent designing, writing, and shipping the site is the same regardless of bucket — usually 30–60 hours.

Subscription services cut the project management out by giving you a single fixed brief and a fixed delivery window. That’s why a $44/month build can be the same quality as a $5,000 freelance build — the difference is process, not skill.

What to budget

If you’re a single-location service business (plumber, salon, cafe, cleaner, PT, accountant, dentist, real estate agent) and you don’t need bespoke functionality, a subscription site at $44–$62/month gives you everything you need: hosting, SSL, schema, mobile speed, conversion patterns, and ongoing edits.

If you have a custom integration (multi-stage booking flow, complex inventory, gated portal), you’re into freelance or agency territory — budget $5,000–$25,000 and an 8-week timeline.

Hidden costs that catch every small business

• Domain registration ($25–$70/year) — never ‘free’ on a builder beyond year one.
• SSL certificate — free with Cloudflare, sneaky $99/year add-on with some agencies.
• Hosting — already part of any subscription site, an extra $200/year on freelance builds.
• Edits after launch — $0 on subscription, $80–$180/hour on freelance and agency.
• Backups, security, monitoring — already done for you on subscription, DIY everywhere else.

The 5-second rule

What we charge — and why

aibuiltmysite charges $44/month hosted or $62/month with a custom domain. That’s $528–$744 in year one. It’s the same site you’d pay $5k for at a freelancer, because we don’t spend three weeks on stakeholder calls and we don’t mark up time we didn’t spend.

We also build the draft first. If it’s not what you wanted, the link expires and you walk. That’s the part nobody else in this market does, and it’s the part that makes the price work.