Your website is built. Now someone wants $99 a month to “maintain” it, and you can’t tell if that’s fair, cheap or a rort.

We read the maintenance pricing pages of 18 Australian web businesses, 11 in Perth on 8 October 2026 and seven in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast on 9 October 2026. Every price below was on the provider’s own page. We haven’t named them, because prices change. On 9 November 2026 we re-checked four of the seven entry prices outside Perth, and none had changed.

The short version: Entry-level website maintenance plans in Australia ran from about $25 a month to $540 a month plus GST on the pages we read, and most sat between $45 and $175 a month before GST. One-off changes were billed at $66 to $200 an hour. CatalystHub’s care plans are $49 a month (Basic), $99 a month (Premium) and from $79 a month (Specialist), all including GST, month to month, with the first month free on a new build. They’re optional. The sites we build can be hosted free on your own account, so a plan is for the upkeep you’d rather not do yourself.

What under $100 a month buys

Short answer: Of the 17 entry prices we recorded, 9 start under $100 a month, and all 9 stay under $100 with GST added. At CatalystHub, $49 a month including GST (Basic) buys hosting, daily off-site backups, security updates, security and uptime monitoring and a monthly report, and $99 (Premium) adds an hour of content updates. On the seven entry plans we read outside Perth, included change time ran from none to about two hours a month, and the two-hour plan was $132 a month (GST treatment not recorded).

The 9 plans that start under $100 a month:

Perth (read 8 October 2026): about $25 a month (a $300 a year plan, including GST), then $45, $59, $60 plus GST, $65 and $75 a month (billed yearly). The pages for $45, $59, $65 and $75 didn’t make the GST clear, but even with GST added each stays at $82.50 or less.
Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and the Sunshine Coast (read 9 October 2026): $75 a month (the page doesn’t mention GST), $89 a month plus GST ($97.90 with it) and $98 a month including GST.

The other 8 entry plans start at $100 a month or more.

Here is what each of our three care plans includes. Every price includes GST and every plan is month to month.

Plan	Price	What’s included	Best for
Basic	$49 a month, inc. GST	Hosting through us (or stay on your own account), daily off-site backups, security and dependency updates (dependencies are the code libraries a site is built on), security monitoring and vulnerability scanning (checks for known security holes), 24x7 uptime monitoring with alerts, a monthly performance report (Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals, Google’s speed and quality scores) and a monthly summary email	Sites that need upkeep but no content changes from us
Premium	$99 a month, inc. GST	Basic, plus one hour of content updates each month, such as swapping a photo, adding a service or updating a page. You email, and the change is done within two business days	Sites that need small content changes made for them
Specialist	From $79 a month, inc. GST	Basic, plus 30 minutes of content updates each month, plus monitoring of your regulator’s rules (AHPRA, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency; the ACCC, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission; or your industry body) or of Shopify platform changes that affect your store	Regulated industries and Shopify stores, such as clinics, allied health and e-commerce

Basic and Premium are both under $100 a month including GST. Specialist starts at $79 a month, and we work out the exact plan with you on the call. The first month is free with every new build, and you can cancel any plan with 14 days’ notice and no exit fees.

What to do next: Running a business in Perth? See our Perth maintenance page. Ready to go? Start your project, or compare every package on the pricing page. Checking a quote? Keep reading and use the tables.

What a monthly maintenance plan costs

Where	Providers read	Entry plans, per month
Perth	11	About $25 to $320 plus GST
Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Sunshine Coast	7	$75 to $540 plus GST

Outside Perth, the seven entry prices were $75 (the page doesn’t mention GST), $89 plus GST, $98 including GST, from $100 including GST, $132 (GST treatment not recorded), $139 including GST and $540 plus GST. Six of the seven start between $75 and $139.

The top plans on the same pages go a long way up: $149 plus GST, $350 including GST, $549 including GST, $590 (GST treatment not recorded), from $2,800 including GST, and $9,900 plus GST a month. The dearest ones add build hours, online-store support and after-hours response.

Two things to check on any quote:

Is GST in the price? Some of these pages include it, some add it, and some don’t say.
What’s the term? In Perth we saw one provider that bills quarterly, one that bills yearly and one with a three-month minimum. Outside Perth, all seven bill monthly and several say there is no lock-in.

What you get for the money

Nearly all of the Perth plans are for WordPress sites, and most entry plans everywhere list the same kind of work:

Updates to the site’s software, the theme and the plugins
Backups, from weekly to daily
Uptime monitoring, which means an alert if the site goes down
A firewall or malware scanning
A monthly report

The big difference is change time: how much of your own updating is included. On the entry plans we read it ranged from none, to 15 minutes a month, to about two hours a month. If you often swap photos, prices or opening hours, that line matters more than the headline price.

What an hour of changes costs

No plan? Then changes are billed by the hour. Six providers publish their rate.

Hourly rate	The fine print
$66	Standard hourly rate
$120	Charged in 15-minute blocks
$120 inc. GST	30-minute minimum
$150 plus GST	15-minute blocks, 30-minute minimum
$176 inc. GST	Basic changes from $88
$200	Drops to $150 for clients on a care plan

One of them lists same-day and weekend work at $180 an hour.

An hour of changes costs $120 or more at five of those six rates. For comparison, our Premium plan includes an hour a month for $99, along with the hosting, backups and updates. If you only touch your site twice a year, paying by the hour is fine.

What it costs when a site gets hacked

One Melbourne provider lists hacked-site repair from $249 plus GST. That covers the investigation and minor fixes, and larger repairs are quoted first.
Sucuri, a website security company, lists its Basic plan at $229 a year, with unlimited malware clean-ups on every plan. Sucuri is a US company and the page doesn’t name the currency, so check it at checkout.

The repair bill is only part of the cost. For all kinds of cybercrime, the Australian Signals Directorate’s Annual Cyber Threat Report 2024-25 puts the average self-reported cost of cybercrime for a small business at $56,600 per report.

Out-of-date software is a common way in. Patchstack counted 7,966 new security holes in the WordPress ecosystem in 2024, and 96% were in plugins. When Sucuri cleaned infected sites in 2023, 39.1% were running out-of-date software. That’s why the monthly plugin updates matter.

Can you do it yourself?

Yes, if your site is on WordPress and you’ll really do it. The tools are cheap.

Job	Tool	Listed price
Backups	UpdraftPlus Premium, Personal licence	$70 a year for up to 2 sites, in US dollars
Uptime alerts	UptimeRobot, free plan	$0 for 50 monitors, checked every 5 minutes
Security and clean-ups	Sucuri, Basic plan	$229 a year (currency not shown)

What it really costs is your time. Someone has to log in, run the updates, check nothing broke and test the contact form afterwards. The Australian Signals Directorate’s Essential Eight baseline says to patch (update) online services within two weeks, or within 48 hours when a hole is rated critical or a working exploit exists.

Do you even need a plan?

It depends on how your site was built.

If it runs on WordPress with plugins, somebody has to update it. That’s either you or a plan. Leaving it alone is how sites end up in the hacked statistics above. If the plan will cost more over two years than a new site, compare the two first: keep maintaining an old website, or rebuild it? For scale, we build a new five-page site for $500 flat including GST, and it costs nothing to host on your own account.

If it has no plugins, there’s much less to do. The sites we build run on Astro, a modern way of building websites, and are hosted on Cloudflare, with no WordPress plugins. They still have code that needs updating now and then, and that’s part of what our care plan covers. But the plugin updates that most WordPress plans are built around don’t apply.

Either way, two things are not maintenance and you pay for them whatever you choose:

Your domain. A .com.au is $22.95 a year at VentraIP’s regular price. Don’t let it lapse. auDA, which runs .au domains, says an expired name gets 30 days in which your website and email stop working but you can still renew. After that, anyone can register it.
Your email. Google Workspace Business Starter is A$9.90 a user a month before tax.

What CatalystHub charges

Three care plans, all month to month, all including GST: Basic at $49 a month, Premium at $99 a month and Specialist from $79 a month. What each one includes is in the plan table near the top.

The first month is free with every new build. You can cancel any month with 14 days’ notice. There are no exit fees, and the site is handed back as it launched, with every login.

After launch, an extra page costs $100, or nothing on Premium if it fits in the monthly hour. We can often look after a site we didn’t build, but it depends on how it was made, so we quote those one by one.

See the plans on our website maintenance page or the pricing page. No site yet, or an old one that costs more to keep than to replace? A new five-page build is $500 flat, live in seven business days. Start your project, or see what a small business website costs.

Frequently asked questions

How much does website maintenance cost per month in Australia? On the 18 pricing pages we read in October 2026, entry plans ran from about $25 to $540 plus GST a month, and most sat between $45 and $175 before GST. Top-tier plans with development hours went as high as $9,900 plus GST a month.

What website maintenance can I get for under $100 a month? Of the 17 entry prices we read in October 2026, 9 start under $100 a month. Our Basic plan is $49 a month and Premium, which adds an hour of content updates, is $99 a month, both including GST.

How much does website maintenance cost per year? Multiply the monthly price by 12. A $49 plan is $588 a year and a $99 plan is $1,188. One Perth provider we read sells a yearly plan at $300.

What does a web developer charge per hour for changes? The six published rates we read ran from $66 to $200 an hour. Check the minimum charge. Some bill in 15-minute blocks and some have a 30-minute minimum.

Is hosting the same as maintenance? No. Hosting keeps the site online. Maintenance is the work of updating, backing up and watching it. Our plans include hosting, but a Standard or Specialist site we build can also be hosted free on your own account, so you never need a plan just to stay online. Ask which one a quote covers.

Do I need maintenance if my site never changes? If it runs on WordPress, yes, because the software underneath keeps changing even when your pages don’t. If it has no plugins, there’s less to do, but someone should still watch the domain, the backups and the uptime.

Can I cancel a maintenance plan? Check the term before you sign. On the pages we read, some plans were month to month and some had a quarterly, yearly or three-month minimum. Ours can be cancelled any month with 14 days’ notice.