What Should a Website Cost
Describe what you need. This works out roughly how much work it is, then shows what an agency in Australia, the United Kingdom or the United States would typically charge for that much work, against what it costs here.
The agency figures are not our opinion of what other people charge. They are published rates from Clutch, dated and linked at the bottom of the page, multiplied by published component hours. You can check every number, which is the only reason a comparison like this is worth reading.
A Typical Site, Priced
Before you describe anything, here is the baseline everything below is measured against: a full marketing site with real functionality behind it, which the published component hours put at 275 to 435 hours of work.
| Built by | Published rate | Typical, AUD |
|---|---|---|
| An agency in Australia | US$100 to US$149 an hour | A$39,200 to A$92,400 |
| An agency in United Kingdom | US$50 to US$99 an hour | A$19,600 to A$61,400 |
| An agency in United States | US$100 to US$149 an hour | A$39,200 to A$92,400 |
| Wizard Works | 1.5 to 2.25 Builds at A$4,500 | A$6,750 to A$10,125 |
The last row is lower for one reason, and it is worth being plain about it. The hours above measure the size of the job, not how long it takes here. An agency figure is what that scope costs when people do all of it by hand, at an agency's blended rate, with an agency's overhead on top. The figure below it is what the same scope costs when the typing is done by AI, the decisions are made by one person, and there is no overhead to carry. It is the same thing built, not a smaller thing.
Now Price Your Own
Where These Numbers Come From
- The hourly rates. Clutch, 21 September 2026, drawn from a database of 79,260 web design agencies and first-party reviews of completed client projects.
- The component hours. Digital Applied, 8 April 2026, from its own delivery data for the first half of 2026, citing Clutch, WebFX and GoodFirms. Discovery 30 to 45 hours, design system 60 to 90, development build 120 to 180, content 40 to 80, and analytics, search, testing and launch 25 to 40.
- The sizing, which is ours and is published nowhere. Those hours describe one representative site. Whether a particular job is smaller or larger than that is a judgement rather than a citation, so it is exposed as three buttons you can disagree with rather than buried in the arithmetic.
- Currency. Converted at US$1 to A$1.4263 and £1 to US$1.3262, fixed on 29 September 2026 rather than fetched live. Daily precision would be false comfort on ranges this wide.
- One thing the sources disagree about. Clutch places the United Kingdom a full band below Australia and the United States. Australian market guides convert to a figure below its Australian band. The samples differ and the bands are wide, which is why everything here is a range and not a number.
- What is in nobody's figure. Third-party spend: hosting, domains, mail, advertising budget. Those are paid at cost wherever the work is done, and no agency quote includes them either.
Prices here are indicative. What a Build and Growth actually include is set out on their own pages, and no GST is charged on any invoice, as the terms explain.