The SiteRoot team7 min read
A cheap website is almost never expensive on day one. That is the trap. You pay A$600, you get five pages that look perfectly respectable, and for about four months it is the best money you have spent.
The cost arrives later, and it arrives as six specific things: what it costs to change a sentence, renewals nobody owns, licences you did not know you were renting, discovering you do not control your own address, the site drifting out of date, and your own unbilled hours. None of them are in the quote. Here is each one, with the mechanism, so you can price it before you sign.
Cost one: changing a sentence
The big one, and rarely discussed at quoting time.
Your prices change. You add a service, drop another, get a new mobile number, want the hero photo swapped for the job you finished last week. Each of those is an email to whoever built the site, at an hourly rate that in Australia typically runs A$80 to A$200 an hour, usually with a minimum charge of an hour for a ten minute job.
The real cost is not the money. It is that you stop asking. A A$150 minimum and a four week turnaround for a price change means the price does not get changed, and that is how a site ends up advertising last year's rates to strangers. The cheap build quietly became a site nobody maintains, because maintaining it has friction and a fee.
Before you sign anything, ask what it costs to change one sentence next March, and how long it takes.
Cost two: the renewals nobody owns
A website is four or five subscriptions wearing one coat: the domain, the hosting, the certificate that makes the padlock, sometimes an email plan, sometimes a template licence. Each renews on its own date, from its own card, with its own notice going to its own email address.
On a cheap build, nobody owns that list. The domain notice goes to the designer who set it up. The hosting card expires when you get a new bank card. The certificate renewal fails silently one Tuesday.
Every one of those ends the same way: your site is broken and you find out from a customer, if you find out at all. The worst is the certificate, because the site is not down. Visitors get a full page browser warning saying your site may be unsafe before they see a word you wrote, they leave, and nothing reports it to you.
Cost three: the licence you did not know you were renting
Plenty of cheap builds sit on a bought template, and many of those carry annual licences for the template and the extras bolted onto it. Individually small, A$30 here and A$60 there, adding up to a yearly bill from names you do not recognise.
There is a worse version. The template stops being updated, because the person who wrote it moved on. Now the site still works but cannot be safely updated, and the honest advice from whoever looks at it next is to rebuild. You paid A$600 three years ago and the current quote is to start again.
Ask which parts of your site are somebody else's product, and what happens when one of them is abandoned.
Cost four: you do not actually control it
The one that hurts most, because it surfaces at the worst moment.
The domain is registered in the designer's account. The hosting is on their reseller plan. The files are on a machine you have no login for, and the email address on all of it is theirs. None of that matters while the relationship is good. When you want to move, or they stop answering, or the business closes, all of it matters at once.
It is not usually anybody being malicious. It is a favour somebody did in a hurry three years ago, and unpicking it can take weeks you do not have.
Three questions sort it out. Is the domain in my business's name in an account I can log into. Can I get a copy of the site files. Whose email address receives the renewal notices.
Cost five: the site going out of date
This is the expensive one, and it never appears on any invoice.
The prices are from two years ago. The hours changed after Easter. There is a service on there you stopped offering. The mobile number is from your last phone. Each of those is a small untruth your business is telling a stranger at 9pm, and the reason they stay on the page is cost three and cost one working together.
The damage is invisible by nature. Nobody rings to tell you they did not ring. A site that is wrong is worse than no site, because it is confidently wrong, and you do not get to explain.
Cost six: your own hours
A cheap build usually means you write the words, source the photos and chase the revisions yourself.
That is not free, it is just unbilled. If you charge A$100 an hour for your actual trade, twelve hours across three weekends writing service page copy at 11pm is A$1,200 of your own time on top of the A$600 you paid. Count it. Not because you should never do it, but because a quote you compare against has to include it or the comparison is fiction.
What about the genuinely free builders?
Free plans are a real option, and cost something other than money.
Typically you get an address with somebody else's name inside it, their branding on your page, and sometimes ads you do not control beside your work. The one that catches people is portability: many free plans have no way to take the site with you, so moving later means rebuilding.
Free is fine for testing an idea. It is a poor place for the address you print on the van.
How to price a website honestly
One number sorts out every quote you will be given, and it is not the build price. It is the total for year two with nothing new added.
Year two has no build in it: the domain, the hosting, the certificate, the licences, and the changes you will realistically ask for. Add them up for each option in front of you and the cheap quote often stops being the cheap one.
Then add the cost of the site being wrong for six months, which is the likely outcome of the option with the most change friction.
Where SiteRoot sits
We are a subscription, so the interesting thing is not the monthly figure, it is which of the six costs above it removes.
A$16.50 a month including GST (A$15 plus GST) covers the hosting, the certificate and every renewal of it, and the changes. Editing a price or swapping a photo does not start a billable conversation, which is the whole point: cost five exists because cost one exists. There is no setup fee, nothing above it to upgrade to, and no template licence underneath it that can be abandoned by someone else.
We watch that your site is still answering and that its certificate has not lapsed, and if either breaks the alert comes to us rather than to a customer.
Your domain stays yours, bought in your own name from a registrar, typically A$10 to A$30 a year. That is on purpose. Cost four should not be possible.
What we are not is a designer who knows your industry, a photographer, or anyone doing your marketing. If that is what you need, a A$5,000 quote is the honest answer.
14 days free, then A$16.50/month (A$15 + GST). Card asked for during your 14 days, one free trial per customer, cancel anytime.
Six questions for any quote, including ours
- What does it cost me to change one sentence, and how long does it take?
- Which renewals exist, and whose email address do the notices go to?
- Is the domain in my name, in an account I can log into?
- Which parts of this are somebody else's product, and what if one is abandoned?
- Who writes the words, and is that in this price?
- What is the total for year two with nothing new added?
