What a website costs in Australia, with the working shown

The number at the bottom of a quote

Most business owners meet the cost of a website exactly once: as a figure at the bottom of a quote, with nothing attached to explain how it was reached. You cannot tell from a single number whether GST has been added, whether the writing is included, whether you will own the site afterwards, or whether anything at all happens after launch day. If it feels high, you have no way to check. If it feels low, you have no way to know what was left out.

This site takes that number apart.

What is published here

Every page follows the same rule: if a figure is stated, the conditions attached to it are stated at the same time and with the same prominence. The number of delivered projects behind the figure. The period it covers. The scope it describes. Whether GST is included or excluded.

That rule is unremarkable in any field where money is discussed in public. It is close to absent in this one. Nine Australian pages about the cost of a website were checked on 31 July 2026 and recorded in research/pricing-bands.json. Not one states GST treatment. Not one states who owns the delivered site. Not one mentions consumer guarantees under Australian Consumer Law, and not one says what happens if a build is never delivered. Every published figure is asserted with no source.

So the standard here is low, and clearing it is not an achievement. It is the minimum a business owner needs in order to read a quote properly.

Where to start

If you have a quote in front of you, read why two quotes for the same site differ and work through the questions listed there against it. If you are being sold a fixed bundle, read packaged website work before you sign, particularly the part about what gets removed to reach a package figure. If you run a small business and are not sure how much site you actually need, small business website packages is the shortest route. If you sell products online, ecommerce website packages covers the costs that sit outside the build and continue forever. And if nobody has mentioned upkeep to you at all, maintenance as a recurring line explains what you have been left holding.

The whole section is indexed under what websites cost in Australia, and the dataset itself, including what is withheld and why, is described in the dataset behind these bands.

If you are shopping for the work rather than the figure, the separate pieces of a website project describes each part as something you can brief and buy on its own. If the build itself is the part that worries you — speed, integrations, migration, whether you can take the site elsewhere — the Brisbane build page covers the engineering side, which is a different conversation from the design one and is usually sold under the same name.

Why there are no dollar figures on this site yet

The dataset that will supply them is marked PLACEHOLDER_UNREVIEWED, and the site is built so that it cannot render a currency figure while that flag is set. The build fails rather than publishes, and the check that enforces it scans the finished HTML rather than the source, so nothing can slip past through a component or a data file.

That guard is deliberate. It would take about ten minutes to publish plausible-looking numbers, and they would be worth roughly what the existing numbers on this topic are worth. Figures will appear when they come from delivered projects, when each published band has enough projects behind it that no individual client can be identified from it, and when the method of collection is written down and can be checked.

Who writes this, and what they sell

There is no version of this site that is independent, and it does not claim to be. What it can be is checkable: every figure names the file it came from, every page shows the demand data behind its own existence, and the commercial relationship is stated wherever it is relevant rather than once in the footer.

You can also read disclosure statement and how this site measures things.