What a website actually costs in Sydney

Ask what a website costs in Sydney and you will get a number between about $500 and about $50,000, which is the same as getting no number at all. The spread is real — it is the difference between a template with your logo dropped in and a piece of software that runs part of your business — but the spread is not the reason nobody quotes you upfront.

Why the price is behind a meeting

Three reasons, and only one of them is about you. The first is that scope genuinely varies, and a number given before anyone knows what you sell is a guess that will be wrong in one direction or the other. That one is fair.

The second is that a meeting lets the price be set to what you seem able to pay. The third is that a published price can be compared, and being compared is uncomfortable if your number is high for what it is. Those two are not about scope. They are about leverage, and they are why "request a quote" is the most common button on agency websites in this city.

The actual range

Here is ours, in full, which is also roughly where the honest end of the market sits for a small Australian business. Prices are in AUD.

Selling online is an add-on rather than a tier: from $1,800 on top of Growth or Bespoke, so a store starts from $5,600. Up to fifty products is included in that; 51 to 150 adds $600, 151 to 600 adds $1,400, and past 600 it gets quoted once we know who is preparing the product data — because at that size, the data is the job.

Below about $1,500, someone is either using a template or not being paid properly. Both eventually cost you.

What actually moves the number

Four things, in roughly this order of impact. Everything else is noise.

• How many pages, and how many of them are genuinely different. Ten pages built from three layouts is a much smaller job than five pages that each need their own thinking.
• How many products, and who is preparing the data. Product photography, descriptions, variants, weights and shipping dimensions are the slowest part of any store build, and the fastest way to double a timeline.
• Whether the design is made for you or assembled from a system. Custom art direction is the difference between our Launch and Growth tiers, and it is real work, not a surcharge for the word "custom".
• Whether the site has to do something, rather than say something. A booking flow, a portal, an integration with the software you already run — that is where a build crosses from a website into tailored software, and where the price stops being a tier.

The costs that are not in the quote

This is where quotes get compared badly. Two numbers can look $900 apart and be identical, or look identical and be $2,000 apart, depending on what sits outside them. The complete list of what can ever appear on top of our build fee:

That is the whole list. Whatever agency you end up with, ask for theirs in the same form — every line that can appear, with who it is paid to. A quote that cannot produce that list is not a fixed price.

Four questions worth asking anyone

• What is the complete list of costs that can appear after this quote, and who is each one paid to?
• How many revision rounds are in the fee, and what does the next one cost?
• Who owns the domain, the hosting account and the site files on the day it launches — and is that in writing?
• If I want to change a price or add a page myself next year, what do I have to do, and does it involve you?

The last two matter more than the number. A cheap build you cannot leave is more expensive than an honest one you can — which is a separate argument, made properly in the note on what happens after handover.