What a website
here actually costs.
Most studios make you send an email to find out. Here are the numbers instead. Three builds and four monthly services, each with what is included, what is not, and the honest list of what would push a price above the from. The scope is agreed in writing before any work starts, and the number does not move unless you ask for something outside it. There is no meter running.
All prices in Australian dollars.A website quote from $2,400, without a sales call.
That is half. The same five page build is $4,900 from 1 October, which is at the low end of what Australian studios charge for it. Until 30 September it is $2,400, and the number goes into the written quote, so it cannot move afterwards.
Every price is on this page. Send one sentence about the business and who buys from you, and we will tell you which of the three builds you need and why, usually within one business day. If the cheaper one is the right one, we say so.
- Without emailing to find out the price
- Without being too small to be worth the trouble
- Without the number moving after you have said yes
Anywhere in Australia. The build happens online, so the town you are in changes nothing about the price, the timeline, or who does the work. One person builds it, and that is the person who replies to you.
What you get for $2,400 is not a smaller version of it.
Most Australian studios quote between $3,000 and $7,000 for a five page site built properly, and the average people cite for a small business site is $5,000 to $10,000. From 1 October this build is $4,900, which sits at the bottom of that. Until 30 September it is $2,400. Nothing on the list below is removed to get there.
- Custom designed for your business, not a bought theme with your logo dropped into it. Nobody else has this layout.
- Written in code rather than built in a page builder, which is why it loads fast and why changing it next year is an edit and not a rebuild.
- Your words cut, ordered and given headings that make sense to a stranger who has never heard of you.
- An enquiry form whose bot protection is verified by attacking it, sending it a deliberately fake token and requiring a refusal. A form that only looks protected is worse than no form.
- Technical SEO and the structured data that tells Google what kind of business you are, done at build time rather than sold back to you later.
- Hosting on Cloudflare's edge, in your own account, with the domain and DNS pointed properly. You own the site, the account and the code, and you can take all three elsewhere.
- One person builds it, and that is the person who answers your email. There is no account manager, because there is nobody to be one.
So why is it $2,400 right now? Because Watchroute is new and needs its first dozen builds more than it needs the margin on them. Early work is what produces the examples, the reviews and the referrals that let a studio charge the market rate later. That is the entire reason for the price, and it is also the reason it ends: on 1 October these go to what they are worth, and the quote you sign before then is the price you keep.
A charity site, before and after.
Daily Bread House take hot meals to people across Brisbane. Their old site had two menu items, no way to volunteer, and on a phone the opening sentence ran off the edge of the screen. It is now eight pages with a volunteer form that works. Both shots were taken at the same window size on 25 August 2026 and neither has been retouched.
Also live and open to anyone: Southern Cross Provisions, Austera Global and Lantern Path Books. See all five builds, with the rebuild before and after →
One question decides most of it.
Not your industry, and not your budget. The size of a site is set by how much you have to explain, and by how hard the person reading it is checking.
How many separate things do you have to explain, and how hard does your buyer look before they contact you?
One thing, one area. They mostly want to check you are real and get your number.
Launch from $2,400Several services or several areas. They are comparing you against two or three others and reading before they ring.
Business from $4,800They check you properly. Terms, entity, process, compliance, or they are overseas, or they found you in a search and have never heard of you.
Authority from $9,500If you cannot tell which one you are, send a sentence about the business and who buys from you. We will tell you which one, and we will tell you if it is the cheaper one.
Worth saying, because people count pages badly: a page is anything with its own address and its own place in the menu. A privacy policy counts. A section further down the home page does not.
Three sizes, and what each one really gets you.
All three are custom designed, written in code, hosted in your own account and handed over so you own the lot. What separates them is how many questions the site has to answer and how sceptical the person asking is.
Launch
Half price until 30 September. You pay $2,400 instead of $4,900, so starting this month is $2,500 less for the same build.
A small, fast site that makes a stranger believe you are real and shows them exactly how to contact you.
A business with one thing to sell and one area to sell it in. A trade, a single site clinic, a consultant, a new business that has never had a site. You have some words already, or you can talk for ten minutes about what you do. You want to look real to somebody who just got your name from a friend and is checking you exist.
Timeline: a few weeks once the words and the decisions are settled. Content from your side usually sets the date, not the build.
Included
- Up to 5 pages, custom designed for the business. Not a theme with your logo dropped in.
- Written in code, so it loads fast and can be changed in a year without a rebuild.
- Your existing words shaped and structured for the web: cut, ordered, and given headings that make sense to a stranger.
- Mobile first, checked on real phones rather than a browser window made narrow.
- An enquiry form with bot protection that is verified working, by sending it a fake token and requiring a refusal. A form that looks protected and is not is worse than none.
- Technical SEO setup: titles, descriptions, headings, sitemap, robots, and the structured data that tells Google what kind of business you are.
- Hosting on Cloudflare's edge, in your own account, with the domain and DNS pointed properly.
- A privacy policy and the trust details people check before they ring a stranger.
- Launch and handover, including a short call and a written note on how to change the text yourself.
Not included, honestly
- Copywriting from scratch. We edit and structure what you give us. If there is nothing written and nothing to work from, that is the Business tier, because writing a site from a blank page is most of the work.
- No blog, news or article system. Nothing to publish into. Adding one later is quoted.
- No shop, no bookings, no logins, no payments. Different build, quoted separately.
- No ongoing marketing. This puts a site up. It does not go and find anyone.
More than five pages. A page per service or per suburb. Nothing written yet. Anything a customer has to log into, book through or pay through.
Business
Half price until 30 September. You pay $4,800 instead of $9,600, so starting this month is $4,800 less for the same build.
Enough pages to answer every question a buyer has, written properly, and set up so you can be found locally.
A business with several services, or several areas, or both, and a buyer who compares you against two or three others before making contact. You want each service to have a page that can be found on its own, and you want the words written properly rather than written by you at eleven at night.
Timeline: a few weeks from the point the content is settled. The writing and your approvals are the slow part, not the build.
Included
- Up to 10 pages, custom designed, with a page per service or per area so each one can earn its own search traffic instead of all of it fighting over the home page.
- Copywriting for every page, written out of a conversation with you rather than filled in from a questionnaire. In your voice, answering what people actually wonder.
- Written in code, fast, and changeable later without starting again.
- Local SEO setup: Google Business Profile claimed and filled out properly, categories, services, hours and area, name and address consistent everywhere, and local structured data on the site itself.
- Enquiry forms with verified bot protection, routed so the enquiry reaches the right inbox and you can tell which page it came from.
- Technical SEO: page structure, internal linking between the service pages, sitemap, robots and schema.
- Analytics and conversion tracking proven against the live form, not just installed. A tracking tag that fires on a page load and never on a submission tells you nothing.
- Hosting on Cloudflare's edge in your own account, domain and DNS.
- Launch, handover and a walkthrough of the site, the profile and the numbers.
Not included, honestly
- The local SEO here is a setup, not a programme. It is done once and handed over. It does not make you rank. Ongoing search work is Found at $850/mo and it is optional.
- No ads. Google Ads is separate, and the ad spend is yours and paid to Google.
- No photography or video. We use what you have, or licensed stock. Directing a shoot is quoted separately and is usually worth it.
- Still no shop, bookings, logins or payments.
More than about ten pages. A buyer who reads your terms, checks your entity and wants to know how you assess suppliers. Selling overseas. Anything the site has to do on the server rather than display.
Authority
Half price until 30 September. You pay $9,500 instead of $18,900, so starting this month is $9,400 less for the same build.
A site built to survive being checked by somebody whose job is to check it.
You sell to people whose job is to check you: procurement managers, overseas importers, compliance officers, regulated buyers, or a stranger arriving from a search result who has never heard of you. The site is not a brochure. It is the thing that has to survive being read sceptically.
Timeline: longer, and most of the wait is on your side. Twenty plus pages of content and approvals takes considerably more time than a five page site. If you need it live this month, say so at the first conversation and we will tell you honestly whether it fits.
Included
- 20+ pages arranged into a real structure: hubs with supporting pages that link to each other, rather than twenty items in a flat menu that nobody reads past.
- A trust centre: terms, entity details, policies and standards, the pages a cautious buyer opens before they reply to an email. This is the whole reason the tier exists.
- Copywriting across the site, including the dry compliance and process pages, which is where most builds give up and paste in filler.
- Edge functions: server side form verification, redirects, region handling, and anything else the site needs to do rather than display.
- A build guard that fails the deploy if unverified copy or a number that must not be published ever reaches the output. Ours does this. It has caught things.
- Technical SEO at structure level: silo architecture, internal linking, schema, sitemap and canonical handling across the whole site.
- Performance checked against the live page on a real device, not against the build output. A passing build is not evidence the site is right.
- Analytics and conversion tracking proven working end to end.
- Launch, handover and written documentation of how the site is put together, so another developer could pick it up without ringing us.
Not included, honestly
- We do not write your legal terms. We build the trust centre out of what your lawyer or accountant gives us. If you need the policies drafted, you need them, not us.
- Not a shop. Ecommerce, payments, customer accounts and inventory are a different build and a different quote.
- No ongoing content programme. Twenty pages at launch is a foundation, not a finished publication. Feeding it afterwards is Found, and it is optional.
- It is not fast. Twenty plus pages of content and approvals take longer than a five page site, and most of that time is on your side, not ours.
Translation or a second market. A migration with existing URLs and rankings to preserve. A document library. Anything customer facing that needs a login.
Storefront
Half price until 30 September. You pay $9,900 instead of $19,900, so starting this month is $10,000 less for the same store.
Your entire shop online: products, cart, checkout, payments, postage and the emails a customer gets after they buy. Set up so you can take an order the day it goes live.
A business with something to sell and no way to sell it online. A maker, a grower, a retailer with a shelf and no website, a wholesaler who is tired of taking orders by text. You have products, or photos of products, or a spreadsheet. You do not want to learn a platform and you do not want a half finished store sitting there taking nothing.
Timeline: usually longer than a brochure site, and product data is what sets the date. Fifteen products with good photos moves fast. Four hundred with none does not.
Included
- The whole store built and configured, not a theme handed over half set up. Products loaded, categories that make sense to a shopper, search that finds things.
- Checkout that works on a phone, tested on real handsets, because that is where most of your orders will come from and where most stores lose them.
- Payments live in your own account, in your business name, paying into your bank. We never sit between you and your money.
- Postage and pickup rules set up the way you actually ship: flat rate, by weight, by zone, free over a threshold, or local pickup.
- Tax set up for where you sell, at the rates that apply to you, so a price shows a shopper the number they will actually be charged.
- The emails after the sale: order confirmation, payment receipt, shipping notice. Written in your voice, not the platform's default.
- Stock counts, so the store stops selling a thing you have run out of.
- The trust pages a stranger checks before entering a card: postage and returns, contact, privacy, and who you actually are.
- Technical SEO for products, including the structured data that lets a price and availability show in Google.
- A handover session on running it: adding a product, changing a price, finding an order, issuing a refund. Recorded so you can watch it again.
Not included, honestly
- Product photography. We can lay out what you have and tell you plainly if it is not good enough to sell with. Shooting it is a photographer's job.
- Writing four hundred product descriptions. A sample set is included so you can see the pattern. Bulk copywriting is quoted.
- Warehouse, accounting or POS integrations. Possible, quoted separately, and priced on the system rather than guessed.
- Marketplace listings. Amazon, eBay and Etsy are their own trades.
- Any promise about sales. A store that works is a prerequisite, not a demand generator. What brings people is the marketing, and that is priced separately and honestly below.
Hundreds of products, or variants across size and colour and material. Subscriptions or recurring billing. Trade pricing or customer logins. Multiple currencies. Moving an existing store across with its order history and its URLs intact.
Why Business carries the recommendation: not because it sits in the middle. If you have more than one service or more than one area, Launch runs out of room quickly, and paying for a second build later costs more than starting with the right one. If you have one thing to sell, we will tell you to take Launch.
Tell us which one you are →Five sites are live right now and you can open every one of them.
See the work →The work that keeps going after launch.
All four are month to month. No lock-in, no minimum term, no exit fee, and none of them is ever a condition of the build. Plenty of people take a build and nothing else.
Someone keeps it online, current and correct, so you never think about it.
For anybody who does not want to think about their website again, and does not want to learn how to edit it.
Included
- Hosting on Cloudflare's edge, in your account.
- Updates and security patching of everything the site is built on.
- Uptime and form monitoring, so we find out the enquiry form broke before you do. A silently broken form is the most expensive thing that can happen to a small business site.
- Domain and certificate renewals watched, so the site does not go dark over a renewal nobody saw.
- Backups of the source, kept off the live host.
- Small changes: text, prices, hours, a staff photo, a new service in a list. We are not running a stopwatch, and we tell you when a change has become a project.
Not included, honestly
- This is not paying us for servers. Sites we build sit on Cloudflare's free tier in your own account. You are paying for somebody to watch it and change it, not for hosting.
- Not new pages, redesigns or new sections. Changing what the site says is care. Changing what it is is a project, and it is quoted.
- No marketing of any kind. No SEO, no ads, no content, no email.
- Unused time does not roll over. A quiet month is a quiet month.
Steady, unglamorous work on how you show up when somebody searches for what you do.
For a local or service business whose customers search for the thing rather than for the company name, and who can wait months rather than weeks.
Included
- Google Business Profile run properly: categories, services, hours, photos, questions answered, posts, and review replies drafted for you to approve.
- New pages and articles each month, aimed at what your buyers actually type, not at whatever a keyword tool says has volume.
- Search term research from real queries, including the ones already reaching you.
- On-page work and internal linking across pages you already have, which is usually worth more than the new ones.
- Name, address and phone consistency checked across the listings that matter.
- A monthly report in plain language: enquiries and calls, what moved, what did not, and what we are doing next month about the part that did not.
Not included, honestly
- No ranking guarantee, and nobody can honestly give one. Anybody who guarantees a position is either guessing or bidding on your own name.
- It is slow. The first month or two is mostly setup and writing. If you need enquiries this fortnight, this is the wrong service and Google Ads is the right one.
- No ad spend and no ads management. Different service.
- It will not rescue a site nobody wants to arrive at. If the site is the problem we will say so and tell you to fix that first, even though it costs us the retainer.
Google Ads run in your own account, with our fee and Google's bill kept separate and visible.
The fee is management only. The $650/mo is what we charge to build and run the campaigns. Your advertising budget is separate, it is set by you, and Google bills it directly to your own card. We never handle it, never mark it up, and never take a percentage of it. Charging a percentage of spend pays the agency more when your costs go up, which is the wrong way round.
For a business that needs enquiries this month rather than next quarter, and has a page worth sending a paid click to.
Included
- The account is created in your name and your billing, and you keep it with all of its history if you leave.
- Campaign build: keywords, match types, negative keywords, ad copy and extensions.
- Conversion tracking proven working against the live form before a cent is spent. Spending before that is buying clicks you cannot measure, on a form that may be broken.
- The search terms report read regularly and negatives added, which is the single job most neglected accounts are missing.
- Landing page advice, including telling you when the page rather than the ads is what is losing the click.
- A monthly report with the real numbers, including the months they are bad.
Not included, honestly
- Your ad spend. It is not in the $650 and it never will be. It goes to Google.
- No guaranteed cost per lead and no guaranteed lead volume. A number promised before a single search has run protects the agency, not you.
- Google only. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn ads are not part of this.
- Landing page builds are quoted separately, per page.
- A budget too small to learn from is not worth managing. If yours is one, we will tell you at the first conversation instead of taking the fee.
Cold email that reaches the inbox, sent slowly and lawfully, in your name.
For a business selling to other businesses, where the buyer is a named person at a company you can identify, and where the deal is worth more than the effort of writing to them properly.
Included
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up and proven by reading the message headers, not by a green tick on a dashboard. The two disagree more often than you would think.
- The sending domain warmed gradually, starting small and increasing only while delivery stays healthy.
- Bounce and reply monitoring, with hard bounces suppressed immediately.
- Sequence copy that reads like a person wrote it, and limits on how often any one person can be contacted.
- A do-not-contact list enforced in the sending tool, not kept in a spreadsheet somebody forgets to check.
- Compliance handled per market: unsubscribe, a real postal address, and the rules of the recipient's country, which differ more than people expect.
- A monthly report: delivered, replied, bounced, and who asked to be left alone.
Not included, honestly
- We do not buy lists and we will not send to one you bought. It burns the domain you also receive your real mail on.
- Business to business only, and only where it is lawful where the recipient is. Some countries prohibit cold email outright, and in those we will tell you no.
- No guaranteed reply rate. Anyone quoting you one has not measured it.
- The volume is deliberately low, especially at the start. This is not a blast, and if what you want is thousands of messages this week, we are the wrong studio.
- Any sending platform subscription you need is yours, in your account, and is not in the $750.
The part most price pages leave out.
A from price is only worth reading if somebody tells you what sits underneath it and what would take you above it. Both lists are here, and neither is a surprise sprung halfway through a build.
What we do not charge for
- The first conversation, and the answer that comes out of it. If a website is not the thing that fixes your problem, we say so and point you somewhere better. That costs you nothing and it costs us the job.
- Hosting. What we build sits on Cloudflare's free tier in your own account. Care pays for somebody to watch it and change it, not for servers.
- The accounts. Domain, hosting, Google Business Profile and Google Ads are set up in your name and your billing, and there is no fee to hand them back.
- Changes at the two points that matter. You see the design before it is built and the build before it goes live, and changes at those two points are part of the job. That is why they happen while they are still cheap.
- A licence or a platform fee. There is nothing of ours in the middle, and no monthly payment is required to keep the site online.
What moves a price above the from
- More pages than the tier includes.
- A shop, a booking system, logins or payments.
- Nothing written yet, and nothing to work from.
- A migration off an existing site where URLs and rankings have to be preserved.
- Several locations or service areas that each need their own page.
- Photography or video direction.
- Anything needing review or sign off from your lawyer, insurer or head office.
These are worked out before you are quoted, and the quote is fixed once you approve it. If something outside the agreed scope comes up mid build, we quote that separately and you decide before it is done.
What we commit to
- Fixed scope, agreed in writing before work starts. You know what is being built and what it costs before any money changes hands.
- You see the design before it is built, and the build before it goes live. Changes at those two points are part of the job.
- You own everything. The site, the source code, the domain, the hosting account, and any advertising or listing account we set up. All in your name.
- Month to month on every retainer. No lock-in, no minimum term, no exit fee.
- If you leave, we hand it over without a fight. Access, source and accounts.
- We will tell you no. If a website is not the thing that fixes your problem, we say so and point you somewhere better.
What we will not pretend to guarantee
- Rankings, positions, leads, enquiries, revenue or a cost per lead. Nobody can honestly guarantee any of them, and a guarantee like that is written to protect the agency, not you.
- There is no money back guarantee, and we are not going to invent one to close a sale. What there is instead: a fixed scope you approve before you pay for it, and no lock-in on anything ongoing.
- A launch date before we know the scope. We give you a real one once we do, and we would rather give it late than invent one to win the job.
The things people think and do not say.
You are one person. What happens if you disappear?
Fair question, and the honest answer is that we build so it does not matter. The site is code in your own hosting account, on your own domain, with the source handed to you at launch. There is no platform of ours in the middle and no licence to keep paying. Any competent web developer can open it and keep going. A studio this size cannot promise it will exist forever, so the design brief is that nothing important should depend on us still being here.
Who owns it?
You do, all of it. The site, the domain, the hosting account, the Google Business Profile and the Google Ads account, all in your name and your billing. If you leave, you take everything and nothing is held back. An account you cannot take with you is a hostage, not a service.
Why not Wix, Squarespace or a cheap template build off Fiverr?
For some businesses, Wix or Squarespace is genuinely the right answer, and if yours is one of them we will say so at the first conversation. Where they cost you is speed, being the same template as thousands of others, a monthly fee for as long as the site exists, and the fact that you are renting rather than owning.
The cheap template build is a different problem: you get somebody filling in a theme with no conversation about who your buyer is or what makes them hesitate, and nobody to ring in six months. If your buyer does not research you before making contact, the cheap option may be enough. If they do, it shows.
Why is this more than the quote I got down the road?
Sometimes the cheaper quote is the right one, and if the job is simple and the person is good, take it. What you get here for the difference: the site written in code rather than assembled in a builder, so it loads fast and can still be changed in two years; the words written rather than filled in; and one person accountable, who quoted it and who builds it. We would rather lose the job than talk you out of a cheaper quote that was going to be fine.
What if I need changes later?
Because it is written in code rather than locked into a page builder, changing it later does not mean rebuilding it. Small changes are what Care at $95/mo covers, or you can send them one at a time and we quote them. New pages are quoted per page. And you can do the text edits yourself if you would rather, which is what the handover is for. There is no monthly fee required to keep the site online.
How long does it take?
A few weeks from the point the content is settled, for most small business sites. Bigger builds take longer, and the twenty page ones take considerably longer. The honest part is that content and decisions from your side usually set the timeline, not the build. We give you a realistic date once we know what is actually involved, and we would rather give it late than give you a date we invented to win the job.
Do I have to take the marketing as well?
No, and it is never a condition. Plenty of people take the build and nothing else. The retainers are month to month and can start six months later or never. If we thought a retainer was the only thing that made the build work, we would tell you that before you paid for the build, not after.
What if it does not bring me any work?
Then we tell you that, with the numbers, and we look at why. Sometimes the site is the problem. Often it is not: the price is wrong, the offer is wrong, the market is smaller than it looked, or the phone is not being answered. A website cannot create demand that is not there, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling.
What we will not do is show you impressions and pretend they are results. Every retainer is month to month so you can stop the moment you think it is not earning its keep, and we hand everything over without a fight.
Tell us which one you think you are.
You have the numbers. What a page cannot tell you is whether your own job lands on the from price or above it. Send a sentence about the business and who buys from you, and we will tell you which of the three it is, what would push it above the from, and if it is the cheaper one we will say so.
What happens next
- A reply from the person who would do the work, usually within one business day
- Which build fits, and the honest reason it is that one and not the one above it
- Anything in your job that would take it above the from price, said now rather than halfway through
- If a website is not the thing that fixes your problem, we say so and point you somewhere better
We reply ourselves, usually within one business day. It goes to a person, not a queue. What you write is used to reply to you and nothing else: no mailing list, and no follow-up sequence if you go quiet. Or call +61 412 793 609. See our privacy policy.