Quick answer: the reason Reddit gives you numbers from $50 a month to $20,000 for “a website” is that those numbers are for different products that happen to share a name. A DIY builder subscription, a freelancer build, a template agency site and a custom agency build each include wildly different amounts of actual work. In Australia in 2026, the honest bands are roughly: $20-$60 a month plus your own time for DIY, $800-$3,000 for a freelancer, $3,000-$6,000 for a template agency build, and $5,000-$15,000+ for a custom agency site. The threads below show where those numbers come from.
Why does every Reddit thread give a different number?
Ask “how much should a website cost” on Reddit and you get a spread that looks broken. In an r/perth thread from August 2023, a small business owner asked exactly that, and the replies ran from a free Google Sites page with a $10-a-year domain, through Shopify and Squarespace at around $50 a month, to about $2,000 for an independent WordPress developer, up to $3,000-$10,000 for Perth agency work. Same question, same city, a 200x spread.
In an older r/smallbusiness thread from January 2023, one commenter put the range at “$100 to millions of dollars” depending on what the site has to do. That sounds like a non-answer, but it is actually the whole answer: the price is not for “a website”, it is for the work inside it.
You add “reddit” to this search because agency pricing pages read like marketing, and you want a number from someone with no invoice riding on it. Fair. So here is what the threads say, decoded.
What are the real price bands in Australia?
These bands are drawn from what Redditors report paying and from published Australian pricing guides such as Digital Nomads HQ’s cost breakdown, which puts the Australian average at $5,000-$10,000+ for a 6-10 page site. They are not our rates, and no single provider spans all four.
| Band | Typical cost (AUD) | What you are actually buying |
|---|---|---|
| DIY builder (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify) | $20-$60/month, ongoing | A template and hosting. You do the design, the words and the SEO yourself, forever. |
| Freelancer / independent developer | $800-$3,000 one-off | Their build time. Design and copy quality vary with the individual. Support depends on them staying around. |
| Template agency build | $3,000-$6,000 one-off | A pre-made theme customised to your brand, built by a team, usually with some copy and SEO basics included. |
| Custom agency build | $5,000-$15,000+ one-off | Design from scratch, professional copywriting, SEO foundations, tracking, project management and post-launch support. |
The bands overlap on purpose, because scope moves the price more than the provider type does. A five-page custom site from a regional studio can cost less than a template build from a capital-city agency with capital-city overheads. That r/smallbusiness poster in October 2024 who was quoted $2,000 for a four-page company site and worried they were being overcharged? By the table above, that quote sits exactly where a freelancer build should.
What is hidden inside the cheap options?
The Reddit threads are good at first-year prices and quiet about year two onward. Three things hide in the cheap bands.
Ownership. On a DIY builder you are renting, not buying. Stop paying and the site is gone. Worse, some cheap “we build it for you” operators keep the domain and the site files in their name, then charge you to leave. That failure mode is common enough that we wrote a whole post on it: what to do when your website is held hostage.
Hosting markups. A 2022 r/smallbusiness thread on annual website costs shows the gap plainly. The poster had heard of owners paying $1,000+ a year for what amounted to WordPress hosting and admin, while an Australian commenter in the same thread paid about $220 a year for equivalent hosting. The difference is not server quality. It is whether anyone ever itemised the bill.
Maintenance. Template and WordPress sites carry a plugin stack that needs patching, and builders change their editors under you. The cheap build often funds a rebuild three years later. The expensive part of a cheap website is rarely the subscription; it is the jobs that went elsewhere while the site limped, then the invoice to do it properly.
What questions should you ask any quote?
Whatever band you buy in, get these four answered in writing before money moves:
- What exactly is included? Pages, copywriting, SEO setup, tracking, mobile design. “A website” is not a scope.
- Who owns what once it is paid for? Domain, hosting account, site files, content. The answer should be you, all of it.
- What does it cost after launch? Hosting, updates, edits. A cheap build with dear hosting flips the comparison.
- What happens if I leave? Can the site move with you, and what does the exit cost? If the answer is vague, the answer is no.
A provider who answers all four without flinching is worth more than one who quotes $500 less and dodges.
So how much should you actually pay?
Pay for the job the site has to do. A sole trader who needs one page that makes the phone ring should not buy a $15,000 build, and a business betting its lead flow on search should not trust a $30-a-month template. If you are a tradie weighing this up, our guide to what a tradie website costs breaks down the trades-specific version, and if you are in the Top End, web design costs in Darwin covers the local market, interstate quotes included.
For transparency: Web Blend builds custom websites for Australian trades and service businesses, so we sit inside one of the bands above and we are not neutral about which one earns its keep. That is exactly why this page quotes Reddit’s numbers and published Australian guides instead of our own; our pricing is on the pricing page where it belongs. The threads are linked so you can read them yourself, and the four questions above work on any quote, including ours.