Why It Costs What It Costs
The honest breakdown of what actually goes into a proper tradie website. Told in seven different trade languages. Pick yours.
For the sparkies
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just want a new powerpoint in the kitchen, my old one’s smashed up.” Easy job, right. Pop it out, pop a new one in, half an hour, $80, done.
Except you rock up. Old wiring’s TPS without an earth. Kitchen’s got no RCD on the circuit it’s running off. The run goes back to a switchboard with porcelain fuses, and the MEN link isn’t visible on the neutral bar. Now you’ve got a decision. Safe job: notify the customer, upgrade the circuit, install an RCBO, label everything, test it, certify it, lodge the CES. Cowboy job: bang a powerpoint in and walk away.
Customer sees both versions as “a new powerpoint.” One’s $80. One’s $1,200. One of them is going to burn the house down or kill someone in five years.
For the plumbers
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just need a new hot water unit, the old one’s pissing water everywhere.” Easy job, right. Drain it, swap it, half a day, done.
Except you rock up. The old unit’s a 250L electric on copper with the temp-pressure relief plumbed straight into a downpipe with no air break. Cold inlet’s got no isolating valve. The new unit’s a gas continuous flow, and the existing gas line is 15mm soft copper running through the eaves, undersized for the new BTU draw. The tundish discharge needs to terminate to a visible point per AS/NZS 3500.4. And the electrical isolator is sitting in a wet zone. Safe job: notify the customer, size the gas line properly, install a proper TPR drain, move the isolator, fit isolation valves, pressure test, issue the certificate of compliance, register with the gas authority. Cowboy job: swap the box, run the gas line undersized, plumb the relief into the downpipe, walk away.
Customer sees both as “a new hot water unit.” One’s $1,800. One’s $4,500. One of them causes a gas leak or a scald injury in three years and the council traces it back to a bloke without a license.
For the chippies
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just want a small deck off the back of the house. Three by four metres, nothing fancy.” Easy job, right. Stick some posts in, lay some boards, weekend, done.
Except you measure up. The slab the deck’s attaching to drops 200mm, so now you’re over the height that triggers a balustrade. The bearer span’s 3.2m which means F11 hardwood or a beefier LVL. Posts are sitting in clay with no drainage so the footings need to go deeper than the frost reach. The deck butts up against a brick wall on a single-storey extension with no flashing, so you’ve got to detail a tray flashing to stop water tracking back. And it’s within 900mm of a boundary so you’re checking the NCC for fire separation. None of which the customer asked about. All of which the council inspector will pick up. Safe job: design it properly, get the engineer’s sign-off on the bearer and footing schedule, build to spec, get the final inspection. Cowboy job: pine bearers, surface-fixed posts in concrete, no flashing, no inspection.
Customer sees both as “a small deck.” One’s $4,500. One’s $9,000. One of them moves underfoot after two summers and rots out the bottom plate of the house from the back.
For the painters
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just want the inside of the house painted, two coats, white. How hard can it be?” Easy job, right. Splash some paint around, two days, done.
Except you do a walk through. Cornices have flaking enamel from a botched re-coat fifteen years ago. Walls have hairline cracks that’ll telegraph through any new coat without proper filling. The render’s pre-1990 which means there’s a real chance of lead paint and you can’t dry-sand it without testing. The kitchen wall’s been wiped down with sugar soap for years and now has a polished surface that won’t take paint without a degreaser and a proper sand. The ceilings have water staining from an old leak so they need a stain block before colour goes on. Safe job: test for lead, mask everything, scrape and feather the flaking, fill and sand the cracks, degrease the kitchen, prime the stains, undercoat, two top coats. Cowboy job: one coat straight over, no prep.
Customer sees both as “two coats of paint.” One’s $3,200 over five days. One’s $1,400 over a weekend. One of them peels within eighteen months, the cracks come back, and the kitchen wall slowly yellows because the grease bled through.
For the concreters
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just want a slab out the back for a shed, six by four. Easy as. Bash it out in a day.” Easy job, right.
Except you survey it. The site’s got a 100mm fall over the length, half the topsoil is clay, the other half is fill from when the house was built and no one knows what’s under it. There’s a stormwater easement clipping one corner. The shed’s a 30m² colorbond, which means a properly engineered slab needs N16 bar at 200 centres and a 25MPa mix with at least a 100mm slump. The forecast for pour day is 32 degrees with low humidity, which means you’ll lose moisture too fast unless you wet-sponge it during set or hessian-cover and water it for the first 48 hours. And you need expansion joints if you want it to not crack across the diagonal. Safe job: dig out and compact a proper subgrade, lay polythene, place reo on chairs, formwork properly braced, pour at the right time of day, screed and float, cover and cure for a week. Cowboy job: dig a bit, throw in some mesh, pour in the heat, walk away.
Customer sees both as “a slab.” One’s $4,800. One’s $2,200. One of them cracks across in two summers and the shed door stops closing because the corner’s dropped 12mm.
For the tilers
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just need the bathroom retiled, the old ones are dated. Few square metres, easy.” Easy job, right. Rip the old ones off, stick new ones on, weekend, done.
Except you strip it. The previous job has no waterproof membrane behind the wet wall (or it’s failed) and the substrate behind the shower’s gone spongy. The hob has no fall to the drain so water’s been pooling for years. The floor’s chipboard on bearers, not cement sheet, so you can’t tile straight to it. The window reveal is timber and was tiled over without flashing. The waste isn’t centred so you’d be cutting half tiles up against the screen unless you re-set it. Per AS 3740 the whole wet area needs a Class 3 membrane, 100mm up the walls, 1500mm up the shower walls, and proper falls to the floor waste. Safe job: strip back to studs where needed, replace damaged sheet, lay cement sheet to the floor, apply two-coat membrane with hold time between coats, set the falls, then tile. Cowboy job: tile straight over the old gear, no membrane, no falls.
Customer sees both as “a new bathroom.” One’s $6,500. One’s $3,000. One of them leaks into the wall cavity within three years, swells the bottom plate, and the customer’s bathroom becomes a $25,000 insurance claim or a fight if it’s not covered.
For the landscapers
Picture this. Bloke rings you. “Just want the backyard sorted. Bit of lawn, garden bed, low retaining wall along the back, maybe a path. Few weekends, yeah?” Easy job, right.
Except you survey it. The wall they’re picturing is 1.3m at the high end, which the moment it goes over 1m needs engineering, council notification, and proper geo-textile drainage behind it or you’ll be back in three years when it’s bowing out. The “bit of lawn” is going on top of builder’s fill, which means topsoil with proper falls or the grass dies in summer and floods in winter. The garden bed runs along the slab edge so you need a root barrier or the new trees crack the slab in eight years. Existing irrigation? None. Reticulation needs proper backflow prevention or council won’t approve it. And the “path” needs to be at least 1200mm wide for accessibility if the customer ever sells. Safe job: engineer the wall, install ag-line and geo-fabric, bring in screened topsoil with a sand cap, lay reticulation with backflow, install root barriers, plant for the actual soil type and aspect. Cowboy job: stack sleepers, throw down some turf, plant what looks nice at Bunnings.
Customer sees both as “doing the backyard.” One’s $18,000. One’s $7,000. One of them looks great for two summers, then the wall bows, the lawn dies, the trees crack the slab, and the customer pays twice.
What’s actually in your website
Right, you’ve got the analogy. Here’s what’s actually under the hood on the framework I build tradie sites on. As of the version that’s live right now, it sits at 98 files. Most of them you’ll never see.
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The HTML pages
The framing and rough-in of the site. Has to be structured properly or the rest collapses. Like getting your top plate and noggin layout right before you pull a single cable, or your formwork square before you pour.
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The stylesheet
One file, around 140KB. Every colour, font, spacing rule, button state, mobile breakpoint, dark mode contrast. Every visual decision on the whole site, in one place. Like the schematic for a whole house on a single drawing. Get it wrong, every page is wrong.
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The accessibility module
Federal law under the DDA, plus WCAG 2.2 standards.Federal disability discrimination law in Australia, plus the global accessibility standards. Means people with vision impairment, motor impairment, or reading difficulty can still use the site. Mine does high-contrast mode, a plain English version, reduced motion for people with vestibular issues, and scalable text without breaking layout. This is the AS/NZS 3000 of the web. Skip it and you’re exposed to complaints, lost customers, and Google ranking penalties.
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The security headers
Content Security Policy, HSTS, frame protection, the lot.A locked-down ruleset that says what the site is and isn’t allowed to load. Same as making sure your switchboard’s properly earthed and bonded before you energise it, or your gas line’s pressure tested. Invisible to the customer. Catastrophic if it’s wrong.
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Automated test runs on every deploy
A workflow that runs Lighthouse auditsGoogle’s site quality scoring tool against the live site every time I push a change. Performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO. Automatically. Same as a logbook of insulation resistance tests, or pressure test reports, or compaction certificates. Proof the work meets standard, not just my opinion.
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Sitemap, robots and structured data
The labelling and documentation of the site. Tells Google what’s where, how to read it, and what the pages mean. Like labelling every circuit breaker on the board, or stamping every joint on a gas pressure test. Skip it and the next person opens it up and has no idea what feeds what.
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Image optimisation
Every photo is in modern WebP format at multiple sizes, served conditionally based on the device. Faster load. Better Google ranking. Easily half a day of work the customer will never see because it just works.
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Self-hosted fonts
Two fonts, four weights, hosted on my server instead of pulled from Google. About 80KB total, properly cached. You’d never notice. Pull them from Google’s CDN and you’re leaking visitor data to a third party and breaking privacy law for anyone in Europe who clicks through.
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The dev notes folder
More than forty “pass” notes. Each pass is a round of testing, finding a problem, fixing it, retesting. Mobile rendering on iPhone vs Android. High-contrast mode toggling. Page weight. Lighthouse scores. None of it is visible. All of it is the difference between a site that works for five years and a site that breaks the first time Google changes something.
The closer
So when a customer asks why a website costs what it costs, I tell them the same thing you tell the powerpoint customer, or the hot-water customer, or the deck customer, or the slab customer.
You’re not paying for the powerpoint. You’re paying for the bloke who knows when the wiring behind it isn’t safe. You’re paying for the test. You’re paying for the certificate. You’re paying for the fact that in five years, your house hasn’t burnt down, your slab hasn’t cracked, your bathroom isn’t leaking into the wall cavity.
Same with a website. You’re not paying for the homepage. You’re paying for the fact that it loads fast enough, is accessible enough, secure enough, indexed properly enough, that in five years it’s still bringing you leads. Instead of sitting on page four of Google because someone built it on the cheap and didn’t know any better.
Cowboys are cheap. They’re cheap for a reason. And the reason always shows up later.
That’s the deal. Whether you want to know more about how I build sites, see what’s included at each price point, or just have a chat about your job, the links below will get you there.
Ready when you are. Built like a job site.
Fixed prices, no lock-in, no monthly captivity. Same way you’d run your own jobs. Pay a deposit, balance when you’ve seen the site and you’re happy.