Paid $8,000 for a website? Here's where that money went
By Max & Daniel · Updated 23 September 2026
If you've paid somewhere in the $3,000 to $8,000 range for a small business website, you're not alone. That's a normal agency quote in Australia. But if you've ever wondered what all that money was for, here's an honest breakdown.
Sales and account management
Before anyone designs anything, there's a salesperson, a discovery meeting and an account manager who looks after you. These roles cost money, and that cost gets built into your quote.
Project management and meetings
Larger teams need people to coordinate them. Status meetings, handovers between designers and developers, and internal reviews all get billed, even though you never see them.
Office, software and overheads
Rent, software licences, insurance and staff all have to be covered by client work. The bigger the agency, the bigger the slice of your quote that goes to simply keeping the lights on.
The actual build
Then there's the part you actually wanted: the design and the build. For a standard business site (home, about, services, contact, an enquiry form), this is often a surprisingly small share of the total. Modern tools have made good websites much faster to build than they were ten years ago. Agency prices mostly haven't caught up.
Did you get a bad deal?
Not necessarily. If your site is fast, ranks on Google and brings in enquiries, it's doing its job. But if it's slow, hard to update, or nobody ever calls from it, it's worth knowing that you don't have to pay agency prices to fix it.
What a website really needs to cost
We build standard business websites for $990 flat, plus $39/month for hosting, domain, email and edits. It's just the two of us, so there's no sales team or account managers to pay for. We build your site before you pay anything, so you can judge the result, not the pitch.
Unhappy with what you paid for? We'll rebuild your site free, and you only pay if it's better.