Field notes · Written in Parramatta
Plain Australian numbers for the decisions small businesses make on their own: a website, an admin hire, a CRM, and the cheap thing that catches the calls you miss. Sources linked, arithmetic shown, no gate.
Websites
There is no official figure for what a website costs in Australia, only ranges published by people selling them. Here are the four bands, what moves the price inside each, the real ongoing costs, and what the ATO lets you deduct.
Hiring
Award rate, twelve per cent super, leave loading, workers comp, payroll tax and the cost of finding them. A part-time admin on $29.45 an hour works out closer to $40 for every hour actually worked, and here is the arithmetic.
Systems
Texting back a missed call costs about seven cents a message at Australian rates. The real cost is the platform, and the real risks are the Spam Act, the new SMS Sender ID Register, and the fact that most Australian landlines cannot send a text at all.
CRM
Per-seat prices are easy to look up and are the smaller half of the bill. Here is what the software costs in Australia, the onboarding fees that are compulsory, what Australian implementers actually charge, and why the famous failure statistic is made up.
Comparison
A human answering service charges per call, an AI receptionist charges per minute, and text-back charges per message. Put all three on one hundred missed calls a month and the ranking is not the one the salespeople describe.
How these are written
Award rates come from the Fair Work Ombudsman, superannuation from the ATO, and software prices from the vendor's own pricing page on the day of writing. Each post lists what it used at the bottom, with a link, so you can go and look.
Where a figure is a market range rather than a published price, it is called a range and it says so. Nothing here is rounded up to make a point, and there are no case studies, because this studio is new and does not have any. Made-up proof would be the fastest way to lose the argument these posts are making.
Prices are Australian dollars and excluding GST unless the sentence says otherwise. Every price we quote for our own work comes from the same place the pricing page reads, so the two cannot disagree.
Twenty minutes on the phone and you will have it, whether or not you hire anyone. If the honest answer is that you do not need us yet, that is what you will hear.
+61 469 759 353Ali Ishtiaq answers it himself. Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm AEST.