We wrote last week about offshore vs. Australian pricing. The question we got back most was simpler: forget offshore, how do we compare to other local agencies? Roughly like this — a freelancer is $1,500–$5,000 for the build, nothing else. A boutique agency doing custom work is $3,000–$10,000+ for the build, then SEO gets quoted separately, usually as an $800–$2,500/month retainer if you want it at all. A branding-led agency — the ones who pitch you on "digital strategy" — starts around $15,000 and still treats SEO as an add-on line item. We're $6,900 AUD for a custom build, or $4,900 if you commit to 12 months of Growth after, and Local SEO & GEO setup is in that number, not quoted after.
Why we don't publish a table naming who charges what
Because it'd be wrong within a month — agency pricing moves constantly and none of it is published anywhere reliable to begin with, so any table is really just us guessing at competitors' rate cards and putting a specific dollar figure next to someone else's name. The bands above are what we see quoted back to us by prospects who came from a competitor first, which is a more honest source than us inventing numbers for a table. If you've got an actual quote in hand, send it to us — we'll tell you straight whether ours is actually better value for what you need, including if it isn't.
The bundling is the actual difference, not the headline number
A $4,000 build quote and a $6,900 build quote look like the same decision — pick the cheaper one — until you notice one of them has no SEO in it at all. The industry norm is to sell the build, then sell SEO as a second, ongoing product, because that's a better business model for the agency: one project fee plus a recurring retainer beats one project fee alone. We priced it as one thing because for a business that doesn't already have an in-house marketing function, a website with no GEO or local SEO foundation isn't a smaller version of the finished product — it's a different, mostly useless product that happens to look the same in a screenshot.
What that's actually delivered, not hypothetically
Edwards Kirby Lawyers, a Sydney insolvency and business law firm, needed more than a website refresh — we rebuilt the public site and shipped a client portal alongside it (JWT + MFA, encrypted document storage), with SEO/GEO built in from the start rather than bolted on after. And Shuttersmith, a plantation shutters business, got the SEO/GEO engagement first — it sent them more business than their original setup could hold, enough that the client backed a second, trade-price shutters business off the back of it. Neither of those came from a design-only build. Both came from treating the site and its findability as the same project.
If you've got a quote from someone else on the table, send it to us and we'll tell you plainly whether it's already good value or what it's missing — and if you just want to see where your own business stands right now, start with a Local SEO & GEO audit rather than a redesign.