What should a website actually cost in New Zealand?

Here’s the honest version, up front, before the explanation.

A decent website for a New Zealand local service business costs between $3,000 and $12,000 to build, plus somewhere between $30 and $300 a month to keep running. Most small service businesses land between $4,000 and $8,000.

If someone quotes you $800, something is missing. If someone quotes you $40,000 for a six-page site for a plumbing company, the price and the scope aren’t lining up, and it’s worth asking what the extra is buying.

Now the part that matters, which is why the range is that wide and where in it you belong.

Why “how much does a website cost” is a broken question

Asking what a website costs is like asking what a vehicle costs. A ute is a vehicle. A digger is a vehicle. Both get you to work.

The number changes based on what the site has to actually do. And here’s where most business owners go wrong: they buy based on how it looks, then wonder why it doesn’t bring in work.

A website has two jobs. Get found, and get chosen. Design is only part of the second one. Plenty of beautiful sites do neither, and they cost the same as the ones that do.

The four price bands, honestly

Under $1,500: DIY and templates

Squarespace, Wix, a Wordpress theme you set up yourself, or a mate’s nephew.

What you get: something exists. It has your name, your phone number, and a photo. For a brand new business with no money, this genuinely beats nothing, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What you don’t get: any of the technical work that decides whether Google shows you. Page speed, structure, the way your services and areas are laid out, the signals that connect your site to your Google Business Profile. It’ll look fine and sit invisible. That’s the deal.

Who it’s for: someone testing whether the business works at all.

$3,000 to $6,000: the proper small business site

This is where most local service businesses should be.

What you get: a custom build, five to ten pages, written properly for what you actually do and where you do it. Service pages. Area pages. A gallery of real work. Fast on a phone. Structured so search engines understand it. Contact forms that land somewhere you check. Reviews displayed properly rather than buried.

What it should include, and you must ask: the words. A huge number of quotes in this range quietly assume you’ll write your own content. You won’t. You’ll mean to, and then six weeks will pass, and the site will launch with placeholder text about your “passion for excellence.” Ask directly: is copywriting included? If it isn’t, either add it or accept the site won’t be finished.

Who it’s for: an established local business that needs the phone to ring.

$8,000 to $20,000: more moving parts

Online booking that talks to your calendar. Payments. A customer login. Many services across many locations. Multiple staff profiles. Something that plugs into your job management software.

What you’re paying for: not prettiness. Plumbing. Every system that has to talk to another system adds real hours.

Who it’s for: multi-location, multi-service, or anything where the website does actual operational work rather than just presenting you.

$25,000 and up

E-commerce at scale, custom software, a business with a marketing team. If you’re a local service business reading this article, this isn’t you, and if you’ve been quoted it, ask what specifically in your business requires it. There may be a good answer. Make them give it to you.

The costs nobody puts in the quote

This is where people get stung, and it’s almost never malice. It’s just not mentioned.

Domain name. $25 to $60 a year. Yours. Make sure it’s registered in your name, not your web person’s. This is the single most common ugly surprise we see. Someone wants to move on and discovers they don’t own their own address.

Hosting. $15 to $80 a month for a small business site. Cheap hosting is slow hosting, and slow sites rank worse and convert worse. Not the place to save $20.

Maintenance. $50 to $250 a month, or a nasty bill when something breaks. Websites are not fences. Software updates, plugins break, security holes appear. A site left alone for three years is a liability, not an asset.

Content updates. New photos, new services, new prices, new staff. Either you can do it yourself (ask to be shown, at handover, on video) or you’re paying someone every time.

Email. Often assumed to be included. Often isn’t. Around $10 a month per address.

Ask for the five-year number, not the build number. A $3,000 build with $250/month attached costs more over three years than a $7,000 build with $50/month. Nobody presents it that way. Do the maths yourself before you sign.

How to tell if you’re being overcharged

Not by the number. By the answers.

Ask what the site is supposed to achieve. A good answer sounds like: more enquiries, from these types of jobs, in these areas. A bad answer talks about modern design, clean aesthetics, and your brand story. Design is a means. If it’s presented as the end, they’re selling you a picture.

Ask who writes the words. Covered above. It’s the difference between a finished site and an unfinished one.

Ask what happens after launch. “It goes live” is not an answer. Who watches it? Who fixes it? What does month two look like? A site that launches and is never touched again starts declining immediately.

Ask if you own everything. Domain, hosting, content, images, the site itself. Get it in writing. “Can I take this elsewhere in two years?” A hesitation is your answer.

Ask to see something they built two years ago, and check it still works. Anyone can show you a launch-day screenshot. Check the sites that had to survive.

The question that matters more than the price

Here’s the one almost nobody asks, and it’s the one that decides whether any of this was a good idea.

What is a customer worth to you?

We’ve written about what a customer actually costs you, and the same logic applies here. A website isn’t an expense you compare to other websites. It’s an investment you compare to what it brings back.

If your average job is $800 and you keep $250 of it, a $6,000 website needs to bring you 24 extra jobs to break even. Over three years, that’s eight a year. Fine.

If your average job is $40,000 and you keep $6,000, that website breaks even on one job. One. And every job after that, for as long as the site keeps working, is profit against a cost you already paid.

That’s why the same $6,000 is expensive for one business and almost free for another. The number on the quote is meaningless until you put it next to what a customer is worth to you. Work that out before you go shopping and you’ll negotiate completely differently, because you’ll know what you’re actually buying.

Two of our clients make the point. A Christchurch bookkeeper’s re-aimed site produced a Google enquiry that became a client within seven days. A concreting business in Victoria had no website at all, then a stranger rang about a house slab four days after launch. Neither of those sites was expensive. Both paid for themselves before the invoice was due, because the work went into what the site had to do, not what it had to look like.

What we’d tell a friend

If you’re an established local service business in New Zealand doing decent revenue, budget $5,000 to $8,000 for the build and $80 to $150 a month to keep it healthy. Insist copywriting is included. Insist you own the domain. Ask what happens in month two.

And know this: a $6,000 site that gets found beats a $15,000 site that doesn’t, every single time. Most of the money that gets wasted on websites in this country gets wasted on the parts customers never see and Google never rewards.