Ask what a website costs and the answers range from a few hundred to tens of thousands, all of them true, because people are pricing different things.
Here is the cost broken into parts at New Zealand prices. At minimum you will know what to ask.
1. The build fee
Roughly three tiers:
A few hundred dollars. Usually a template: pick a theme, drop in your text and photographs. Fast, functional, identical to several thousand other sites, and not very changeable. Fits a tight budget where the requirement is simply having a website.
Fifteen hundred to five thousand. Custom design on a standard structure: content and layout organised around your business rather than a template filled in. Most small and medium businesses land here. Our own pricing sits in this band — single-page from NZ$1,499, multi-page from NZ$2,499, functional builds from NZ$4,999.
Ten thousand and up. Generally means real feature development: memberships, payments, scheduling, integration with existing systems. Price differences here come from complexity rather than design.
Worth noting: the same number can include very different things. Ask whether copywriting is included, whether photography is, how many revision rounds, whether baseline SEO setup is. Anything excluded costs money later or costs your time.
2. Domain
A .co.nz or .nz domain runs about $25 to $40 a year depending on registrar.
Nothing to save here, but one thing to confirm: whose name the domain is registered in. It should be your company, not your web developer’s account. This sounds obvious and yet a surprising number of small businesses discover their domain is held by someone else only when they try to change providers.
You can check now — domain registration details are public, so search your own domain and look at the registrant.
3. Hosting
The widest variation, from nothing to over a hundred a month.
Static hosting: near zero. For a presentation site, free allowances on the main platforms generally suffice.
Shared hosting: $10 to $40 a month. Ask about renewal — a discounted first year followed by two or three times that is standard practice in this industry.
A VPS: $15 to $100+ a month. Cheap options are plentiful, but the real cost of a VPS is not the monthly fee, it is somebody’s time maintaining it. An unmaintained VPS eventually has an incident.
We include hosting and maintenance in the build fee for the first year, then NZ$299+GST annually. That number is published because it belongs on the quote rather than appearing in year two.
4. Maintenance — the line most often left out
Frequently blank on a quote, because including it makes the total look worse. The work does not disappear for having been omitted.
Someone has to do: security updates for the system and plugins, SSL renewal, regular backups, broken link and error checks, and responding when something fails.
Undone, a site does not break immediately — it decays. An abandoned plugin starts throwing errors, a certificate expires and every page shows a security warning, a scanner finds a vulnerability. The timing is unpredictable; the occurrence is not.
Maintenance services run roughly $30 to $150 a month, or bundled annually. More useful than the price is asking how quickly someone starts work when something breaks. “Within 24 hours on business days” and “we’ll get back to you” are different products.
5. Content
The most underestimated, because it is usually “supplied by the client”.
That sounds free and is your time. Writing a page, taking or sourcing photographs, assembling product information — a five-page site done properly is several days of work.
Outsourced, copywriting runs about $100 to $300 a page and photography $300 to $800 for a half day.
Whether to outsource depends on what your time is worth. Either way the cost is real and should not sit at zero in the budget. Content arriving late is the most common reason these projects overrun.
6. Promotion
A finished site does not mean visitors. Strictly this is not a build cost, but if the point is winning customers it has to be counted.
Google Ads in New Zealand runs $1 to $5 per click in ordinary categories and above $10 in competitive ones — legal, insurance, building. A $500 monthly budget buys a hundred and something clicks in most categories, which is a starting scale.
SEO is the other route, costing mostly time and content, slower to arrive and without a continuing payment to a platform.
The total
A typical five-page business website, year one:
Build 2,500 + domain 35 + hosting and maintenance (included) 0 + content (your own time) — about $2,535 in cash.
From year two: domain 35 + hosting and maintenance 299 + GST, around $380 a year, or $32 a month.
That surprises people, because the weight is in year one and holding it afterwards is cheap. So a very low build price with no mention of annual fees is worth questioning. Conversely, the annual fee itself is rarely a burden.
Three questions before signing
What does year two onwards cost? Not the first year.
Who owns the code and data, and can they be exported? This determines whether you are locked in. The answer should be specific rather than “of course”.
What does maintenance cover and how fast is the response? A quote without this line is not cheaper; it is work nobody is doing.
Our prices are on the site, annual fee included, so those three have answers before anyone talks to us. Take the same three questions to anyone else — whoever is vague about them now will be vague later.