Start with what you need

Before the price, the job. A tradie's website has to do four things. Show up when someone in your area searches for what you do. Show them you're real: your work, your face, your van. Give them one tap to call you. Take a quote request when you're on a roof and can't answer.

That's it. Five pages covers it: Home, About, Services, Projects, Contact. Not fifteen. Not a "digital presence". Five.

Hold that in your head while you read the quotes.

Quote one: the agency

$5,000 is the usual number. Sometimes $3,500, sometimes $8,000, but $5,000 is the one most tradies have heard. It comes with a proposal, a "discovery session" and a timeline of six to ten weeks.

The catch isn't the $5,000. It's what comes after. Hosting and maintenance at $100 to $300 a month. An SEO retainer at $500 to $1,500 a month if they can talk you into it. The site's usually built on a platform that needs updates, and the updates are what the retainer pays for.

Add it up over five years. $5,000 plus, say, $200 a month for maintenance. That's $17,000. For five pages and a phone number.

Agencies aren't crooks. They're built to serve businesses with marketing budgets, and the $5,000 site is usually a good site. It's just built for a company with a marketing manager, not a bloke with a ute.

Quote two: the subscription

$150 a month. Sometimes $99, sometimes $199. No big upfront cost, which is the whole pitch, and for a lot of tradies it's the one that feels safest.

Do the sum. $150 a month is $1,800 a year. Five years is $9,000. That's nearly double the agency's build cost, spread thin enough that it never feels like a decision.

The real catch is ownership. You're renting. The site's on their platform, on their account. Stop paying and it's gone. Want to move? There's nothing to move. You leave with your domain, if you were smart enough to register that yourself, and nothing else. Every dollar you put into it stayed with them.

Quote three: do it yourself

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy. "Build your website free this weekend."

The free plan has their ads on it and a domain that ends in their name. The plan that fixes both is $20 to $40 a month, so it's a subscription with extra work. And the weekend is the part that gets you. Most DIY sites we've seen from tradies are 80% done. The Services page has placeholder text. The phone number's in the footer where nobody scrolls on mobile. The photos are from the template because the real ones "need cropping".

Your time isn't free. If you bill $90 an hour and you spend three weekends on it, that's a $2,000 site you're calling free. Plus the monthly plan. Plus it still isn't finished.

So what's the honest number?

Think about the actual work. Writing five pages of copy for one trade in one area: a few hours. Laying out the pages around your photos: a few hours. Setting up hosting, domain, tap-to-call, the quote form, the bits that make Google understand what you do: a few hours. Revisions: an hour or two.

Call it a couple of days' skilled work. Not six weeks. Not $5,000. And nothing about it needs a monthly fee, because a five-page site with a phone number doesn't need "maintenance". It needs a hosting account that's free (Cloudflare's is) and a domain that renews for about $15 a year.

Somewhere around $1,000, paid once, is what the job's worth. We charge $990, because that's what it costs to do it properly and get paid fairly, and we host it on an account in your name so you never pay us again.

The test to apply to any quote

Whatever you're quoted, ask two questions.

One: what's the total over five years, including everything monthly? Make them write it down.

Two: if I stop paying you, does my website still exist?

If the answer to the second question is no, you're not buying a website. You're renting one. That's fine if you know it. Most tradies don't find out until they try to leave.