What a business website should actually cost in South Africa
Honest 2026 numbers on what a website costs in South Africa, from the build to the yearly running costs, and what to ask before you pay a deposit.
Nobody wants to ask this out loud, so here is the plain answer. You are trying to work out what a website should cost, and every quote you get is wildly different. R2,500 from someone on Facebook. R45,000 from an agency in Sandton. Both of them sound confident.
What a quote often leaves out is what the site costs to keep once it is live, and whose name the domain ends up in. Both are worth knowing before you compare headline numbers.
The short version
Website quotes in South Africa fall into four bands, from a template for under R3,000 up to an ongoing service at R8,000 to R20,000 a month.
The build is not the whole bill. Domain, hosting, email, licences and upkeep keep costing money every month or year, and a good quote says what they cost.
Most of the money people waste on websites is not wasted on the build, it is wasted on the silence afterwards.
If referrals already bring you enough work, a good once-off site in the R15,000 to R30,000 range does the job. If you need more work coming in, no once-off build will fix that on its own.
Before you pay a deposit, get it in writing that the domain goes in your business’s name and that you get your own logins and a copy of the files.
Here is the honest map.
The four price bands, and what you actually get
These are the ranges we see in South Africa, not quotes. Every studio prices differently and the same brief can come back at either end of a band.
R0 to R3,000. The template. You or a cousin builds it on Wix or a free WordPress theme over a weekend. It exists. It has your logo on it. For a brand new business that just needs to look real while it finds its feet, this is not a stupid choice.
What you are not getting: any thinking about who your customer is or why they should choose you. It will look like a template because it is one, and it will sit there doing nothing.
R5,000 to R15,000. The freelancer build. A real person builds you a real site, usually five pages, usually on WordPress. This is where a lot of small businesses in South Africa land.
The catch is what happens after. The site launches, the freelancer moves to the next job, and eighteen months later nothing has been updated, the plugins are out of date, and the phone number is wrong. You did not buy a bad website. You bought a website with no one looking after it.
R20,000 to R60,000. The proper build. A studio does discovery, strategy, copywriting, design, and build. Someone thinks about what each page is for. The copy is written to sell rather than to fill space.
This is genuinely better and for a business with real revenue it is usually worth it. The honest catch is the same as above, just more expensive: it is still a once-off. A brilliant site left alone for two years is a brilliant site nobody visits.
R8,000 to R20,000 a month. The ongoing service. Nobody builds you a thing and walks away. Someone runs it: the site, the content, the search, every month, and reports on whether it is working.
This costs more over a year, obviously. It is also the only band where the website is expected to bring in customers rather than just exist.
The build price is not the whole bill
Some costs come back every month or every year for as long as the site is live. A quote can leave them out, or cover year one and let the renewal turn up later.
| What | Roughly what it costs |
|---|---|
| A .co.za domain | R90 to R110 a year to renew |
| Shared hosting | R85 to R100 a month entry level, R135 to R280 for business plans |
| Business email | Often included with hosting, or roughly R110 to R180 a user a month for the basic Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 plans |
| SSL certificate, the padlock | Free on many hosting plans |
| Premium theme or plugin | About $50 to $120 a year each |
| Someone looking after it | R300 to R2,500 a month on published care plans |
Ranges we saw on the price pages of South African hosts, registrars, resellers and studios, and of the software makers, in September 2026, not quotes. Some include VAT, some leave it out and some do not say. Prices change, and anything priced in dollars moves with the exchange rate.
The domain. Look at the renewal price, not the sign-up price. One big host charges R49 for the first year and R109 after that. If your designer bills you for it, ask what the registrar charges and what they add on top. The fee registrars pay the .co.za registry also goes up 6.2% on 1 October 2026, so renewal prices may creep up.
Email. Many South African hosting plans already come with mailboxes, so plenty of small businesses pay nothing extra. If you want Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, the basic plans start at about $7 a user a month on a yearly plan before tax. The rand prices in the table are what local resellers charge, and they move with the exchange rate. For a team of five, that can cost more than the hosting.
SSL. The padlock should not be a line on your bill. Let’s Encrypt gives certificates out for free, and some of the big South African hosts include them on every plan. If a quote has a yearly SSL fee for an ordinary business site, ask what it buys you.
Premium themes and plugins. Plenty of WordPress sites run on paid add-ons with yearly licences, such as Elementor Pro from about $49, Gravity Forms at $59 or Yoast SEO Premium at about $119 for one site. Three or four of them come to roughly $160 to $330 a year. Ask whose account the licences sit in. If the designer holds them and stops paying, those add-ons usually stop getting updates and support on your site.
Looking after it. The cheaper care plans we looked at bundle hosting, updates and backups, and some include about an hour of work a month. Some studios bill by the hour instead, and one we checked lists R500 an hour before VAT.
Add up just the domain and hosting, with mailboxes included, and a simple site costs roughly R1,100 to R3,500 a year to stay online. That is before paid email, licences or anyone’s time.
The money goes on the silence after launch, not the build
A website is not a printed brochure. It is a shop window on a street where the layout changes every month. Google updates, competitors publish, your prices change, your best photos are from 2019. Left alone, a site does not stay still, it slides backwards.
So the real question is not “what does a website cost.” It is “what does it cost to keep a website actually working.” Those are different purchases and most people only ever get quoted for the first one.
Where your customers come from now tells you which band to buy
Ask yourself one question: where do your customers come from right now?
If the honest answer is word of mouth and referrals, and you are happy with the volume, buy a good once-off site in the R15,000 to R30,000 range. You need to look credible when someone Googles you after a referral. That is a real job and a once-off build does it fine.
If the honest answer is “I need more work coming in than I am getting,” then a once-off website will not fix that, no matter what you spend. You do not have a website problem, you have a problem getting customers, and the website is one part of it. That is the ongoing band.
If what you are really pricing is a monthly marketing retainer rather than a website, here is what a digital marketing retainer costs in South Africa.
Get the whole job in writing before you pay a deposit
Two quotes for “a five-page website” can describe completely different jobs. Before you compare prices, check that each one says in writing:
- how many pages, and who writes the words and supplies the photos
- how many rounds of changes are included
- what the site is built on, and which paid themes or plugins it needs
- whether the domain, hosting and email are included, and what they cost after year one
- who fixes and updates the site after launch, and what that costs
- the deposit, when the rest is due, and whether prices include VAT
Then, before any deposit leaves your account, ask these. The answers matter more than the price.
- Will the domain be registered in my business's full legal name, with an email address I control?
- Will I get my own login to the domain account and the hosting, not just the website?
- If we stop working together, do I get a full copy of the site files and database?
- Will the agreement say the design, code and words you make for me are mine once I have paid?
- Is there a minimum term on anything monthly, and how much notice do I give to stop?
On that last one, do not count on consumer law to get you out. Section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act lets a consumer cancel a fixed-term deal early with 20 business days’ notice, though the supplier can charge a reasonable cancellation fee. But the section says it does not apply to deals between juristic persons, such as two companies. So if your business is a Pty Ltd and so is the studio, you will probably be held to the term you signed. If you trade in your own name, it may cover you. Either way, if it matters, check with a lawyer before you sign.
The domain, the logins and the files should all end up with you
The domain. Strictly, nobody owns a .co.za. The registry treats it as a licence to use the name while the fees are paid, and the person or business named on the record, the registrant, is the one who controls it. When it moves to another registrar, the approval email goes to the registrant’s address. If that is your designer’s name and email, you cannot approve a move or a change of name yourself, and getting it back can be slow and expensive. Here is what to do if your web designer disappeared with your domain.
To check yours, the registry’s free WHOIS lookup shows the registrar, the expiry date and, when it is filled in, the registrant organisation.
The hosting. Know which company hosts your site and get your own login to that account. If your designer keeps many clients on one account and cannot give you that, get regular full backups instead. If you only control the domain, you can point it at a new host, but the files and old mailboxes stay behind on the old one.
The files and the code. Ask for a full backup you can keep. As South African copyright law is generally explained, paying a contractor does not by itself give you the copyright in the code and design they make for you. That usually takes a written assignment, signed by them, so put it in the agreement, and check with a lawyer if there is real money or a dispute involved.
The accounts around the site. Your Google Business Profile, Analytics, Search Console and social pages should list you as an owner or admin, not only your designer.
Also read the small print on managed website plans. At least one big South African provider says openly that its managed sites are not portable and are switched off if you cancel. That can be a fair deal at a low price, as long as you know you are renting, not buying.
We run the ongoing one, from R12,000 a month
Our main service is the ongoing one, and it runs from R12,000 a month: we build and run the site, write and publish the content, and do the search work, then report back monthly in plain English.
A starting price, not a fixed one. What you pay depends on the size of the site and how much needs running each month, and you get a firm number in writing before anything starts. Elsewhere on this site the same service is quoted as $750 a month, because we work with businesses anywhere and invoice in your own currency. It is one price, not two.
It is month to month with no lock in. The domain, the content and the site are yours, and if we part ways they come with you. We also do once-off builds, quoted on request.
That is not the cheapest thing on this page, and if you are a brand new business finding your feet it is probably not right for you yet. We would rather tell you that now than take your money.
But if you are established, your work is good, and you are quietly annoyed that businesses worse than yours are getting found ahead of you, that gap is what we close.
If you are not sure where your current site stands, ask for a free review. A person reads your site and sends it back within two working days, and you keep the report either way. If you would rather talk it through, get in touch.