The Cost of a Website
Go back just 25 years, and building this Neo Sites website you’re on would have cost thousands upon thousands of dollars per month to pay someone to build and maintain it. You’d be hiring someone with a university level degree to work for weeks just to get the website’s foundations going. That doesn’t even include any of the aesthetic parts of the site. These days, the game has changed. Anyone can make and run a website for next to nothing (although it’s still quite tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing). So here’s a breakdown of the costs of running a website and hopefully you’ll learn something that you didn’t already know.
The Basics
It’s super simple to get started on a website. For as little as $7 (AUD) per month, the hassle of building the infrastructure to run your own website is taken care of. Now, this is for a very basic website. Normally, for a single page where you don’t want anything fancy going on. For most people though, websites will cost you between $20-$30 per month.
For transparency and your reference, let me share the cost of running neosites.com.au.
Website Builder & Host
I started out by using a free trial of Wix, Squarespace, and Wordpress to build my website. I made nearly identical websites on all 3 platforms before deciding that Squarespace was the way to go for me. Easy to use and some advanced trickery when I wanted to dive under the hood. That cost me $28 + GST per month.
Domain
Once that was paid, I had my website: chinchilla-finch-e43h.squarespace.com (try it, it works). Obviously, that doesn’t look quite right. Squarespace gives you your own free domain (or website link). But, if I kept this domain, it would be really hard to find on Google and look very unprofessional on my business cards. So cost number 2 was a proper domain.
After some searching, I ended up paying for my domain from crazydomains.com.au. Nothing special about them, they were one of the cheapest I could find and their website was the one open when I went to pay (another contender was godaddy.com). After purchasing the domain for 2 years, the total came out to just under $1 per month. Now, that was with a half price discount, but still cheap and a necessary cost, no matter how you decide to go about making your website.
Website Building Cost
Now, this one is more ambiguous. For me to build my website as per my specifications and requirements, it took about a week. This is in no way an indication of time or performance from my services, it’s just what it took me. I was at a point where I had pretty much all the free time I wanted and since I was building my own website, I was able to give myself feedback immediately as I went along building it.
I also have experience in building websites and coding in general, which helped me immensely. It’s also not my first time building a Squarespace website, and so, it will just be easier for me than it might be for you, if it’s your first time trying to build a site.
Total
So, if you want to build a website for yourself from the ground up, it would cost you really anywhere between $7 - $40 per month for the average user.
For me, it costs $30 per month, give or take a couple of dollars.
The Premium Stuff
Maybe your website needs more than mine. Some of this will come free, but some will have to cost you. Keep reading and I’ll help walk you through the costs of different website platforms and what the cost differences would be if I were to theoretically implement them.
Ecommerce
Ecommerce is surprisingly easy to setup and use in 2026. Most common subscription tiers for your website will already include the ability to sell items. The real question is how much do you want to spend upfront and how much do you want to spend ongoing.
The “hidden cost” of running an ecommerce shop is all in the transaction fees. Most websites will charge a transaction fee straight out of the purchase, but the amount they charge changes depending on your subscription level. The more you pay, the less the transaction fee.
Here’s a list of different ecommerce website builders and their costs:
Shopify
Shopify is the most common and easy to use platform for online businesses.
They have a flat fee of 30c and then between a 1.4% - 1.75% transaction fee on top.
Squarespace
Squarespace is a very common platform for building sites on.
They have a flat fee of 30c and then between a 1.35% - 1.75% transaction fee on top.
Wix
Wix is also a very common platform for building sites on.
They have a 0% - 4% transaction fee
Wordpress
Wordpress is not as common anymore and not as user friendly as the other 3 on this list.
They have a 0% - 10% transaction fee. It’s worth noting though, that 10% fee is on their $0 plan and 8% on their $6 plan, whereas Squarespace, Wix and Shopify all start at $17, $21 and $42 respectively.
So, Wordpress is here if you want cheap and simple ecommerce, but just know, you’re still paying for the pleasure.
Example
To continue using my website as an example, let’s look at how much it would cost for Neo Sites to have a paid online course.
I pay for the $28 core plan. This includes a 1.75% + 30c transaction fee. Since I want to sell an online course, it would be easiest to just use their built in tools. But on my plan, it would cost me an extra 5% digital content transaction fee. To get around this, I’ll treat it as a regular physical goods sale, then I would manually email out the digital course afterwards. My transaction fee on physical goods sales would be 0%.
So it would not cost me any upgrades in my monthly subscription, but instead cost me 1.75% of the transaction + 30c for every transaction.
Only if I was making roughly $1,000 per month would I start to consider changing tiers for that reduced transaction fee.