Ask five people what a small business website costs and you'll get five answers, ranging from "nothing, just use Wix" to a five-figure agency quote. All five answers are real. They're just describing different things.
Here's the honest breakdown of what each option costs in Australia in 2026, including the ongoing costs that almost never make it into the first conversation.
The short answer
- DIY website builders: $15–$60 a month, plus a lot of your time
- A freelancer: usually $800–$3,000 upfront, then you're on your own
- A web agency: $5,000–$20,000+, aimed at bigger businesses
- Managed flat-fee services like Topos: a fixed monthly fee, everything included
The right answer depends less on your budget than on how much your time is worth and what the website needs to do. Let's take them one at a time.
DIY builders: cheap until you count your weekends
Wix, Squarespace and friends advertise from around $15 a month, but the plan you actually want (no ads, your own domain, the features that matter) lands closer to $30–$60 a month once you add a domain and an app or two. Over five years, that's $2,000–$3,500. Not nothing.
The bigger cost is time. Building a site that looks professional takes most first-timers somewhere between twenty and sixty hours: choosing a template, fighting the editor, writing every word yourself, and getting it looking right on a phone. If your Saturdays bill at even $50 an hour, the "free" option is the most expensive one on this list.
DIY is genuinely the right call for some businesses. We wrote an honest guide on exactly when: Wix vs hiring someone.
Freelancers: a wide, wide range
A freelance designer or developer will typically quote $800–$3,000 for a small business site, depending on experience and how custom the design is. Good freelancers do good work at fair prices. The catch is the range: the same five-page brochure site can be quoted at $600 by a student and $4,500 by a specialist, and from the outside the quotes look identical.
The other catch comes later: the handover. When the site is delivered, it's yours, which means the updates, hosting, security patches, and the broken contact form at 9pm are yours too. Budget $20–$60 a month for hosting and maintenance, or a per-hour rate every time something needs touching.
Agencies: built for bigger budgets
A proper web agency will charge $5,000 to $20,000 and up, and for that you get strategy workshops, custom design, copywriting, and project management. For a twenty-staff company with complex needs, that can be money well spent.
For a cafe, a tradie, or a solo professional, it's usually overkill: you'd be paying for process you don't need, to solve problems you don't have. Most small businesses need five pages that load fast, look right on a phone, and make it easy to call. That's not a $15,000 problem.
The costs nobody mentions upfront
Whatever route you pick, the sticker price is rarely the whole bill:
- Hosting: $10–$50 a month, forever
- Domain name: around $20–$40 a year for a .com.au
- Maintenance: software updates, security patches and backups, in your time or someone's billable hours
- Changes: every price update or new photo is your time or someone's invoice
- The rebuild: most small business sites get rebuilt every four to five years as design standards move on. That upfront cost comes back around.
When you compare options, compare five-year costs, not day-one costs. The maths changes a lot.
What actually moves the price
Four things, mostly: how many pages you need, how custom the design is, whether you need features beyond a brochure (online booking, e-commerce, member areas), and who writes the words. A five-page site for a cafe or a trade business sits at the simple end of every one of those dials, which is exactly why it shouldn't cost five figures.
Where Topos sits
We built Topos for the simple end done properly: $50 a month, flat. Design, build, hosting, security, and updates are all included. You send us your logo and photos, we design and launch the site within a week, and when your prices change, you will have the ability to make the change on the site (or just tell us, and we change them). No upfront cost, no hourly rates, no rebuild bill in four years.
You can see exactly what that buys on our example work page: real sites, live right now, built the way this article says they should be.