If you ring five people about a website for your business, you will get quotes between about $500 and $15,000 for what sounds like the same job. That’s not because four of them are lying. It’s because “a website” describes at least four different products.
Here’s how to tell them apart.
The four things people mean by “a website”
The DIY builder — $0 to $500 a year. Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy. You pick a template and do the work yourself. Genuinely fine for some businesses. The cost is your weekends, and the ceiling is low: when you want something the template doesn’t do, you can’t have it.
The template flip — $500 to $1,500. Someone buys the same template you could have bought, drops your logo in, and invoices you. Nothing wrong with it if that’s what you’re told you’re buying. The problem is it’s usually sold as custom work.
The custom small-business site — $1,500 to $4,000. Someone designs a layout for your business, writes or edits your words, builds it properly, and sets it up so Google can find you. This is what most local businesses actually need.
The agency build — $8,000 to $50,000. The same site as above, plus an office in the CBD, an account manager, a project manager, a sales commission, and a designer who has never been to your workshop.
How to tell which one you’re being offered
Ask these three, and listen for hedging:
- “Is this a template or a design for my business?” A straight answer either way is fine. A vague one isn’t.
- “Whose name is the domain registered in?” It should be yours. If the answer is “ours, we handle all that”, you don’t own your own address.
- “What happens if I want to leave in two years?” You want to hear “you take everything with you.” Anything else is a lock-in you’ll discover later.
The bit nobody quotes for
Whichever you pick, the slow, unglamorous part is the same: photos and words. It’s the single biggest reason a site that should take two weeks takes four months.
Before you get a quote, spend an afternoon on this:
- Twenty photos of your actual work, taken on a modern phone in daylight. Not stock photos of a smiling stranger in a hard hat.
- A list of every service you offer, in the words your customers use for them. Not “hydronic solutions” — “underfloor heating.”
- The three questions you answer on the phone every single week.
Bring that to the conversation and you’ve knocked a fortnight off the build, whoever ends up doing it.
What ongoing costs are legitimate
You should be paying, every year, for:
- A domain name — $15 to $40 a year. Non-negotiable, and it’s yours.
- Hosting — $5 to $30 a month for a site this size.
- A security certificate (HTTPS) — should be free and included. If someone is charging you $200 a year for one, that’s not a real cost.
Anything above that is a service, not a cost, and you should be able to see what you get for it. “Maintenance” with nothing listed against it is a subscription to nothing in particular.
And the honest answer
For most businesses around Sunbury, a well-built five to ten page site sits somewhere between $900 and $2,500, and the ongoing cost is under $50 a month all in. If you’re quoted well above that, ask what specifically justifies it. Sometimes there’s a real answer. Often there isn’t.