The price spread on Australian websites is wider than any other category I see. I've seen a great five-page Webflow site go for $2,500. I've seen a worse five-page WordPress site go for $32,000. Both clients were happy. So what's actually going on?
The answer is that "website" isn't really one product. It's three products, with three different cost structures, that get sold under the same name.
The three kinds of website
Every site you see on a small or medium Australian business falls into one of these:
- Brochure: $2k–$5k. Up to 6 pages on Webflow, Framer, or a polished WordPress theme. Three weeks. Mobile-first. Good photography, decent copy. This is the right answer for 80% of small businesses.
- Marketing site: $7k–$18k. Custom-designed, real CMS, proper SEO, lead capture, CRM integration. Six to ten weeks. The right answer for businesses where the website is doing real conversion work.
- Brand site: $20k–$80k+. Editorial design, custom motion, headless CMS, often performance budget enforced in CI. Ten weeks plus. Right when the website matters as much as the product, fashion, agencies, premium brands.
The mistake I see most often is brochure businesses paying brand-site prices, or brand businesses paying brochure prices. Both end badly.
Why the spread exists
A Webflow template, lightly customised, takes 20–40 hours of designer/developer time. A bespoke Next.js site with a custom design and a Sanity CMS backend takes 200–400 hours. That's the entire spread, in one sentence.
The work in the middle, copy, photography, SEO setup, is roughly the same regardless of platform. So the marginal cost of going custom is mostly engineering hours, and engineering hours in Australia are $80–$220 each.
The most expensive part of a website is usually the work that has nothing to do with the website.
What "needs custom" actually means
Here's the honest test. You need a custom site if any of these are true:
- You ship more than ten content pieces a month and need a workflow your CMS doesn't support out of the box.
- Performance is a competitive moat, every 100ms of load time costs you measurable revenue.
- Your brand has motion, type, or layout opinions that templated platforms can't deliver.
- You're integrating with internal systems (booking engines, custom search, member portals) that need a real backend.
If none of those apply, Webflow or a polished WordPress theme is the right answer. You're paying $3k instead of $30k, and you can afford to redo it in two years.
Hidden costs of websites
The build cost is the visible part. The total first-year cost includes:
- Hosting: $0–$200/month. Webflow includes it. Custom sites usually run $30–$80/month on Vercel or similar.
- Domain and SSL: ~$30/year. Trivial, but easy to forget at handover time.
- Copywriting: $1.5k–$5k if you're not writing it yourself. The single biggest predictor of whether the site works.
- Photography: $1k–$4k. Stock images make a brand-led site look generic. Don't skip this.
- SEO setup and content: $2k–$10k if you want it done properly. Schema, internal linking, on-page optimisation, keyword strategy.
- Ongoing maintenance: $50–$300/month. Plugin updates, security patches, performance monitoring.
The bottom line
For most Australian small businesses, $2k–$5k on Webflow is the right answer. For most growth-stage startups, $7k–$15k for a marketing site is the right answer. For brands where the site is part of the product, $20k–$50k for a custom site is the right answer.
The wrong answer is paying for tier three when you need tier one. If you want three real quotes from Australian developers and designers, that's exactly what we do.