A website costs between $500 and $50,000 in Australia, which is a range wide enough to be useless. The number that matters is what sits behind it. At the bottom you are buying a template with your name on it. In the middle you are buying a site built to rank. At the top you are buying custom software. Here is what each band actually gets you, and how to tell which one a quote in front of you belongs to.
For a small Australian service business, budget $1,500 to $3,500 for a properly built three to five page site, and $3,500 to $15,000 for a fully custom build with suburb landing pages. Newcastle Web Co's Starter is $1,800 fixed and The Growth starts at $3,500. Anything under $1,000 is almost always a template with no SEO, which is why it never produces enquiries.
The five honest price bands
DIY platforms: $30 to $60 a month
Squarespace, Wix and the rest. That is $360 to $720 a year, forever, and you do all the work. You get a template that tens of thousands of other small businesses are also using, no keyword strategy, no LocalBusiness schema and no suburb targeting. Most of these sites never rank for anything except the business name, which people only search once they already know you exist.
Budget freelancer: $500 to $1,500
Usually a WordPress or Squarespace theme with a logo dropped in. It can look perfectly acceptable on launch day. What is almost never included is anything that makes Google care: keyword research, schema, heading structure, internal linking, suburb pages. The site goes live, nothing happens, and the ad budget quietly becomes permanent.
Professional agency, starter build: $1,500 to $3,500
This is where our Starter sits at $1,800 fixed. The difference at this level is not how it looks, it is what is underneath: full keyword research, meta titles and descriptions written per page, LocalBusiness and FAQPage schema, and local targeting around your suburb. A build in this band will rank. A budget build at half the price will not, which makes the cheaper one more expensive.
Custom agency build: $3,500 to $15,000
Designed and coded from scratch with nothing shared with any other site. Our Growth package starts at $3,500 and includes 30 SEO suburb pages on top of the custom design. The Authority sits at the upper end with 10 to 20 pages and 50 suburb pages, priced at the consult because the scope genuinely varies.
Enterprise: $15,000 and up
Custom platforms, system integrations, a development team and a project manager. Real work, real budgets, and almost never what a Newcastle small business actually needs.
What actually moves the price
Quotes vary on the same handful of factors. Knowing them lets you compare two quotes that look wildly different and work out whether they are even for the same thing.
- Page count. More pages means more copy, more design and more build time. It is the single biggest line item.
- Custom design or adapted base. Drawing from scratch costs more than adapting a base that is already fast and already structured.
- Whether SEO is included. Most cheap builds include none. A proper build includes keyword research, meta, schema and internal linking as standard.
- Suburb landing pages. 30 on Growth, 50 on Authority, each targeting one suburb and service combination. This is the biggest driver of local reach.
- AEO and GEO. FAQPage schema for Google's AI answers, plus llms.txt and entity signals for ChatGPT and Perplexity.
- Copywriting. Whether someone is writing the words or you are. Standalone copywriting starts at $1,000.
- What happens after launch. Hosting, patching and content changes are ongoing work, and a quote that ignores them is not a complete quote.
What a cheap website actually costs
A $500 site has an obvious price. The real cost is everything it does not do, and that bill arrives monthly rather than once.
No SEO means no Google traffic. No Google traffic means no organic enquiries. No organic enquiries means every customer arrives through a referral, word of mouth, or an ad you paid for, and you keep paying for that ad for as long as you want the phone to ring. Meanwhile the competitor with a properly built site is fielding calls from people who found them at 9pm on a Sunday.
No schema markup means Google's AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT have nothing verified to work from. When somebody asks who the best electrician in Hamilton is, they are not scrolling a list of ten links any more, they are reading one answer. Our guide to how AI decides which business to recommend covers what a site needs before it can be named in one.
What Newcastle Web Co charges
We publish fixed prices because you should know the number before you get on a call with anyone.
- The Starter, $1,800 fixed. Three to five pages on a proven professional base, adapted to your brand. Full SEO, AEO and GEO. Sub-2.5-second loads, 95+ Lighthouse, schema on every page, Search Console and GA4 connected at launch. Three weeks.
- The Growth, from $3,500. Five to ten pages designed and built from scratch, plus 30 SEO suburb pages, each targeting one location and service combination. Timeline confirmed at the consult.
- The Authority, book a call. Ten to twenty custom pages and 50 suburb pages, for a business that wants to own its category across the Hunter. Scope and price at the consult.
After launch, every build goes onto a monthly support plan and any build runs on any plan. Maintain is $50 a month for Cloudflare Pages hosting, SSL, uptime monitoring, security patching and up to two small content edits. Momentum is $200 a month and adds one suburb page and one blog post every month. Scale is $550 a month for four to six suburb pages, four posts and 48 hour turnaround. The full breakdown, including the add-on packs, is on the packages page.
Does a cheap website ever make sense?
Sometimes, and it is worth being honest about when.
If you are testing whether a business idea has any legs at all, and you need something at an address this week so a supplier or a council form has somewhere to point, a $500 site or a Squarespace subscription is a reasonable holding position. Same if every customer you will ever get comes through a wholesale contract or a single referral partner, and search genuinely plays no part in how you get work.
What does not work is treating a cheap site as a first step toward a real one. Retrofitting keyword research, schema, a proper heading structure and suburb pages onto a template build costs more than starting again, because most of what needs to change is structural rather than cosmetic. The build gets thrown out and you pay twice.
So the question is not what is the cheapest site you can buy. It is whether search is part of how customers will find you. If it is, spend once at the level that actually ranks. If it genuinely is not, spend as little as possible and put the money somewhere it earns.
Six questions to ask any web designer
These will tell you more about what you are buying than the quote will.
- Is SEO included in the build, or is it an add-on?
- What schema markup goes on each page?
- Will you build suburb landing pages, and how many?
- What are the ongoing costs after launch, in writing?
- What is the turnaround, in writing?
- Do I get the files at the end?
If they cannot answer all six with specifics, the things that make a site rank are probably not in the scope. Ask before you sign, not after.
Our website design page lists exactly what is in each build, and the WordPress vs Astro comparison covers why the platform choice changes the three year cost as much as the build price does. If you want a number for your own project, tell us what you need and we will give you one, with no sales call attached.
Written by Newcastle Web Co, web design & seo in Cameron Park NSW 2285. Last updated 19 August 2026.
