A do-it-yourself website on Squarespace, Wix or Webflow costs roughly $15 to $160 a month in software alone, forever. A custom WordPress site built by a freelancer or agency in Australia typically costs $5,000 to $25,000 upfront, plus hosting and a maintenance plan on top. A full stack platform, built and owned outright rather than rented, costs more again to build, and ends with everything, the code, the database, the accounts, in your name. Nobody publishes one honest number for what a website costs, because the real answer depends on what you are actually buying.
This guide separates three things that get lumped together in every quote: what it costs to build the site, what it costs to keep it running every month after, and what it costs you later if you never actually owned any of it. Most comparisons only cover the first one.
By the end you will have current ranges for the four common paths, plus the ongoing cost each one hides. Where a Lumeen price is not public, we say so rather than making one up. For how a website should be structured once it is built, see our guide to making a website agentic ready.
What actually changes the price
Every website quote, whatever the platform, is really pricing five things: how many pages and how much content, whether the design is a template or built around your business, what the site needs to do beyond display pages, who is doing the work, and what happens to it after launch. Two sites that look identical from the outside can cost ten times apart because of the last three.
- Pages and content: a five-page brochure and a fifty-page site with a blog and a service catalogue are different jobs, on any platform.
- Template or custom design: picking a theme costs nothing extra; a layout built around your actual services and customers takes longer and costs more.
- Integrations: a contact form that emails you is free. A form that creates a record in your CRM, blocks a calendar slot, or raises an invoice is custom work.
- Who builds it: you, a freelancer, an agency, or a full stack team, in that order of cost and, usually, capability.
Page builders: Squarespace, Wix and Webflow
Squarespace, Wix and Webflow all work the same way commercially: a monthly or annual subscription for the platform, a template you customise inside their editor, and no code of your own. The prices below are from each vendor's current pricing page, in US dollars, billed annually unless noted.
Squarespace
Squarespace's plans run from Basic at about $19 a month up to Advanced at close to $99 a month, billed annually, after a price rise of up to 26 percent that took effect in July 2026. Every tier includes hosting, an SSL certificate and support; the higher tiers add advanced ecommerce and analytics.
Wix
Wix's four paid tiers run from Light at $17 a month to Business Elite at $159 a month, billed annually, with Core at $29 a month the entry point that adds a store. A free plan exists but carries Wix ads and a wixsite.com address, which rules it out for a business.
Webflow
Webflow's Basic site plan starts at about $15 a month billed annually, and its Premium plan, which folded the old CMS and Business tiers together in a May 2026 pricing update, runs about $25 a month. Ecommerce and a paid workspace seat for the visual editor are billed on top, so a Webflow site with a shop and a small team usually lands well above the headline number.
The number on the pricing page is the floor, not the total, and none of the three includes the time to actually build the site. All three also keep charging for as long as the site exists. Stop paying and the site comes down.
WordPress with a freelancer or an agency
WordPress itself is free and open source. What you pay for is hosting, a theme, plugins, and whoever builds it. Managed WordPress hosting for a small business site typically runs $15 to $60 a month, well above the $3 to $10 a month entry price most hosts advertise, which is usually an introductory rate that jumps at renewal. A .com.au domain adds roughly $15 to $40 a year.
The build itself is where the range widens. Freelance web developers in Australia charge roughly $32 to $138 an hour depending on experience, so the cost of a freelancer build depends entirely on scope and hours. Agencies quote by project rather than by the hour: Australian small businesses typically pay $5,000 to $25,000 for a professional agency-built WordPress site, with simple brochure sites at the low end and sites with custom features or ecommerce toward the top.
- Hosting: $15 to $60 a month for managed WordPress hosting, on top of a shared-hosting rate that is usually promotional.
- Domain: roughly $15 to $40 a year for a .com.au name.
- Freelancer build: hourly rates of $32 to $138, so total cost tracks scope and hours rather than a fixed price.
- Agency build: $5,000 to $25,000 for a standard small business site in Australia, more for custom functionality.
A custom full stack site
A full stack site is not a template with a theme swapped in. It is a custom frontend, a backend, a database and APIs, built and hosted the way a software product is, rather than a page builder subscription. Content, services, prices and enquiries live in the database as data, not as text inside a page layout, which is what lets the site connect to a CRM, take a booking, or be worked on directly by AI later. That is the case we make in full in our guide to making a website agentic ready.
This costs more to build than a page builder site or a templated WordPress build, because more of it is genuinely built rather than configured. It should not cost more to keep. A full stack site does not carry an ongoing per-month platform subscription the way Squarespace, Wix or Webflow does; the ongoing cost is hosting infrastructure, security and whatever further work you choose to commission.
Lumeen's Foundation project follows this model: the current site is inventoried and migrated with nothing lost, and every account and repository is handed to the customer's own name, with the current site live throughout. The price is not published because it depends on the size of the current site and what the new one needs to do. Tell us what you are working with through the enquiry form and we will come back with a quote.
The cost you do not see on the invoice
The build price is the easy part to compare and the smallest part of the real cost over a few years. Every option in this guide keeps costing money after launch, and the type of cost differs by platform.
- Page builders: the subscription never ends and never converts into something you own. Cancel and the site, and usually the domain-linked email, disappears.
- WordPress: hosting, theme and plugin renewals, plus a maintenance plan; a typical professional plan for a small business site runs $75 to $200 a month, more for a busier site.
- Full stack: hosting and security are ongoing, and further development is optional rather than a subscription you cannot avoid.
There is a cost this guide has not put a number on, because nobody publishes one: what it costs you if you never owned any of it. A domain registered by a past agency, hosting on a freelancer's personal account, or plugins licensed to someone else's email are not hypothetical. When that relationship ends, migrating away is itself a paid project, on top of whatever you already spent. The cheapest website, over its lifetime, is usually the one you can leave without paying someone else for permission.
Which option fits your business
If you need a site live this week on a tight budget and do not yet know what the business needs from it, a page builder is the right tool, not a compromise. Move up to WordPress with a freelancer or agency once you need a design or a feature the templates cannot do, and budget for hosting and a maintenance plan alongside the build. Move to a full stack, owned platform once the website needs to talk to your other systems, once an agency or freelancer holds accounts you cannot reach, or once you are rebuilding for the second or third time and want the next rebuild to be the last one.
Whatever you choose, ask for three numbers, not one: the build cost, the monthly cost after launch, and what it would cost to leave. Most quotes only answer the first.
Key takeaways
- 01
Squarespace, Wix and Webflow run $15 to $160 a month in software alone, and the subscription never converts into something you own.
- 02
A freelancer or agency WordPress build in Australia typically costs $5,000 to $25,000, plus $15 to $60 a month in hosting after launch.
- 03
A full stack site costs more to build because more of it is genuinely built, but it drops the ongoing platform subscription page builders carry forever.
- 04
The real comparison is build cost plus ongoing cost plus the cost of leaving, not the number on the homepage.
Frequently asked questions
Is Squarespace or Wix cheaper than a custom website?
In software cost alone, yes: $15 to $160 a month against thousands of dollars to build a custom site. But a page builder subscription never stops, and never turns into something you own. Compare a few years of subscription against a one-off build plus modest hosting before deciding.
How much should a small business in Australia budget for a website?
For a freelancer or agency WordPress build, budget $5,000 to $25,000 to build, then $15 to $200 a month for hosting and maintenance. For a page builder, budget $15 to $40 a month with no separate build fee if you do it yourself. A full stack build is quoted individually because it depends on what the site needs to do.
Why does a full stack website cost more upfront than WordPress or a page builder?
Because more of it is actually built rather than configured from a template: a custom frontend, a backend, a database and the APIs that connect to your other systems. That work is what lets the site take actions later, such as creating a CRM record from an enquiry, rather than just displaying pages.
What ongoing costs should I expect after the site is live?
Hosting at minimum, on every platform. Page builders bundle hosting into the subscription. WordPress needs hosting, theme and plugin renewals, and usually a maintenance plan. A full stack site needs hosting, security and monitoring, billed separately from any further development you choose to commission.