The range of answers you will get to this question is genuinely absurd. You can get a website built for $500 on Fiverr or $150,000 from a large agency. Both are real numbers and both are sometimes the right answer. Most Sunshine Coast businesses fall somewhere in the middle, and here is an honest breakdown of what that looks like.
The real tiers
$1,500 to $4,000: DIY platform with professional help
This is Squarespace or Wix with someone who knows what they are doing doing the setup, the copy, and the SEO foundations. It is not custom. You are working within a template system with limited control over performance and design. For a sole trader or a local service business with straightforward needs, this is often the right call.
What you get: something live that looks professional and works. What you give up: distinctiveness, performance ceiling, and the ability to do anything non-standard.
$4,000 to $12,000: Professional WordPress or Shopify build
This is where most Sunshine Coast small businesses land when they want something properly built. A professional designer, custom theme or proper template work, SEO foundations, schema markup, proper hosting setup. At the upper end of this range you are getting something that genuinely represents the business well.
What you get: a site that performs, ranks, and converts. What you give up: the bespoke design and engineering work that sits above this tier.
$12,000 to $40,000: Prestige custom build
Custom design from scratch, built on WordPress, Shopify, or modern frameworks like Next.js. Every element is intentional. Performance is engineered (not hoped for). Schema, Core Web Vitals, accessibility, CRO best practices are all built in from the start.
This is where we typically work. It is a category difference, not a price difference.
$40,000+: Complex applications and platforms
E-commerce at volume, custom booking or membership systems, SaaS products, anything with significant backend complexity. These are not marketing sites, they are software products that happen to have a web interface.
The hidden costs most quotes miss
Photography and video. Stock images make a site look generic. Real photography for a Sunshine Coast business costs $800 to $3,000 per shoot. Budget for it.
Copywriting. The copy on your site is doing the actual selling. Amateur copy on a prestige design is a waste of the design budget. Professional copywriting adds $2,000 to $8,000 for a full site.
Hosting and ongoing maintenance. A properly hosted WordPress site costs $50 to $150 per month for managed hosting. Add a maintenance plan for updates, security monitoring, and minor changes: another $150 to $400 per month. This is not optional.
Redirects and migration. A rebuild without a proper redirect plan destroys years of SEO equity. This is a technical task that takes time and should be in the quote.
What you are actually paying for
The difference between a $4,000 site and a $20,000 site is not hours. It is judgment. It is a designer who knows what makes something feel right and wrong at the level of typographic detail. It is a developer who understands performance budgets and does not bolt on twelve plugins that slow everything down. It is strategy baked in from the start rather than retrofitted at the end.
A site that costs $4,000 and costs you clients because it does not convert is more expensive than a site that costs $20,000 and generates an extra client per week.
Get three quotes. Ask each one what is included in terms of schema, Core Web Vitals scores, redirect management, and ongoing support. The answers will tell you more than the price.
