Most New Zealand web designers will not tell you until you have sat through a meeting. We would rather you knew now. A custom-built business website from us starts at $1,199 including GST, with the first year of New Zealand hosting and your domain name included in that figure. After the first year you pay $324 a year to keep the site hosted and the domain renewed. Those are the numbers. Everything below explains what sits behind them and what pushes a price up.
A rebuild of an existing site starts at $799. A new site is $1,199. An online store starts at $1,399. All inc GST, and all include your first year of hosting.
Hosting and domain renewal from year two onward. No monthly subscription, no licence fee, no charge for the editing tools built into your dashboard.
All prices include GST and the first year of New Zealand-based hosting, along with domain name renewal where we manage it. Rebuilds and online stores start at the figures shown and move with the size of the site — a five-page rebuild and a forty-page rebuild are not the same job. If yours looks like it will come in above the starting figure, we will talk it through with you before anything begins rather than after.
The build price is the easy number. The one that catches people out is what arrives every year afterwards, and it is where a cheap-looking quote often turns expensive. Here is every recurring cost attached to a website with us, and roughly what the same items cost elsewhere so you have something to measure against.
| Item | With us | What it usually costs elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | Included in the $324 a year | $150 to $600 a year, often on an overseas server |
| Domain renewal | Included in the $324 a year | $35 to $60 a year for a .co.nz |
| SSL certificate | Included, renewed automatically | $0 to $200 a year depending on the host |
| WordPress and plugin updates | Included | $40 to $150 a month on a maintenance plan |
| Backups | Included | Often a paid add-on, sometimes not offered at all |
| Editing your own content | Included — ClientDesk, no extra charge | Hourly rate, or a page-builder licence at $100 or more a year |
| Small content changes | You do them yourself in plain English | $90 to $180 an hour, minimum charge applies |
Two businesses can ask for a website and get quotes that are thousands apart. That is not always someone taking advantage — usually it comes down to a handful of things that genuinely change how long the work takes. These are the ones that move the number most.
A five-page site and a thirty-page site are different amounts of work, and every page needs its own structure, its own search terms and its own writing. Page count is the single biggest driver.
If you supply the content, the build moves quickly. If it has to be written from scratch, that is real time. Most of our clients supply rough notes and we shape them, which sits somewhere in the middle.
An online store adds products, payment, shipping rules, tax settings and order handling. It is a different piece of software sitting inside the site, and it costs more to set up and to look after.
Good photographs of your own work make a site. Stock images do not. If you have no usable photos, either a photographer or the time spent sourcing something decent goes into the figure.
A contact form is standard. A booking calendar, a multi-step quote builder, a members area or anything that connects to software you already run is custom work and gets priced separately.
A rebuild of a tidy site is cheaper than a new build. A rebuild of a site with broken structure, no backups and a decade of clutter can cost more, because untangling it takes longer than starting over.
They are reasonable options and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. If you are testing an idea, or you have more time than money, building it yourself is a sensible way to start and plenty of businesses have done exactly that. What follows is what those routes actually cost once you add everything up, and where they tend to run out of road.
Around $300 to $600 a year once you are on a plan that allows a custom domain and removes the platform branding. Over five years that is $1,500 to $3,000, which lands close to a custom build. The real cost is your time — most people we speak to spent forty or fifty hours on it before deciding they wanted help.
Three things come up again and again: the site is slower than it should be and that shows in rankings, the structure cannot be changed enough to compete for local search terms, and you cannot take it with you. Rebuilding elsewhere means starting from nothing.
Genuinely cheap, and occasionally fine. The problems appear later — no one to ring when it breaks, hosting you do not control, a domain registered in someone else's name, and a site built on a page builder whose licence expires. We rebuild several of these a year.
If your budget is genuinely under $500, or you need a single page to point people at while you get going, we will tell you to build it yourself and come back when the business justifies the spend. We would rather do that than sell you something you do not need yet.
The price you see is the price. If your job looks like it will land above the starting figure — more pages than usual, or a rebuild with more in it than most — we will say so before we start, not once we are underway. Nothing gets added along the way unless you have agreed to it.
No. We take a deposit to start and the balance when the site goes live. For larger builds we split it further. Talk to us about what suits your cash flow.
Because we support what we build, and we cannot do that on a server we have no access to. Hosting with us is how updates, backups and security stay handled rather than becoming your problem.
You do. The domain is registered in your name from day one. If you leave, you take the domain and your content with you.
Nothing for the structural work — sensible page structure, speed, metadata and local signals are built into every site. Ongoing optimisation is separate and only worth paying for once the site is live and earning.
Usually three to five weeks for a standard site, and most of that is waiting on content and photos rather than build time. Rebuilds are often quicker because the words already exist.