There’s a real spread in what AU tradies pay for a website + ongoing service. The cheap end is $79 a month. The premium end is $300 plus.

A lot of tradies see the $79 number, sign up, and find out 6 months in that the leads aren’t coming. Then they switch to a $200+ service and the leads start coming. They paid for both. They wasted the first 6 months.

This post breaks down what’s actually in each tier so you can pick once and stick.

What “$79 a month” usually buys

The $79/mo packages from companies like The Free Tradie Website Crew, Onboard, and busi.au all bundle the same core things. We’re not picking on them — they’re honest about what they sell. The bundle is:

A website on their template. Pre-built, you fill in the content. 5–6 pages. Mobile-friendly.
Hosting + SSL. Your site stays online with HTTPS.
A domain. Usually something like yourbusiness.com.au.
An email forwarder. Mail to info@yourbusiness.com.au lands in your existing inbox.
Some content updates if you ask. Usually 1–2 changes a month included.

That’s it. That’s the $79 product.

What you do NOT get for $79

This is where tradies get caught out. The $79 tier doesn’t include:

Google Ads management. They don’t run ads for you. If you want leads from paid search, you pay extra (usually $200–500/mo) or DIY.
Google Business Profile management. Your GBP is your responsibility. They don’t post, they don’t reply to reviews, they don’t add photos.
Local SEO. Citations, schema markup, suburb landing pages — none of this is in the package. Your site exists, but nobody’s making sure it ranks.
Lead capture beyond a basic form. No tracked phone numbers, no AI auto-responder, no SMS confirmations. Just an HTML form posting to your inbox.
Performance reporting. You don’t get a monthly summary of what’s working. You’re flying blind.
Any guarantee on leads. They’re selling a website, not lead-generation. If the site doesn’t bring you leads, that’s not their problem — they delivered the website.

The $79 product is a website with hosting. Calling it “lead generation” is the misleading part.

What “$299 a month” usually buys (Rigup as the example)

We charge $299/mo. Here’s what’s in it:

The full website + hosting + domain + email forwarding (the $79 baseline).
Google Business Profile management. Posts twice a month, photo updates, review monitoring with replies, Q&A maintenance.
Local SEO. Citation building, schema markup on every relevant entity, suburb-specific landing pages, ongoing query monitoring.
Monthly content (4 posts). AI-drafted, human-reviewed, published on your blog. Targets long-tail searches like “how much does it cost to upgrade a switchboard in [suburb]”.
Lead capture stack. Form submissions, tracked phone number that forwards to your mobile, tracked SMS number, AI auto-responder that replies in under 60 seconds.
Review automation. Post-job SMS asking your customer for a Google review. Automatic. You don’t have to ask.
Google Ads management. PMax + Search campaigns, weekly tuning, search-term mining, ad copy refreshes. Standard ads management included for spend up to $2,000/mo.
Monthly performance report. One page in plain English. Calls, form fills, GBP impressions, top searches, what’s working, what’s next.
A 5-leads-per-month guarantee. If a calendar month from go-live shows under 5 measurable leads, that month’s $299 auto-refunds to your card via the Stripe API. We track every lead through our infrastructure so the count’s auditable.

You also pay Google directly for the ads (~$500/mo recommended), in your own ad account that you own.

Honest comparison: which is right for you?

Pick $79 if:

You already get plenty of leads from word-of-mouth and just need a website to validate to customers that you’re a real business.
You’re confident running your own Google Business Profile, posting to it regularly, replying to reviews.
You’re either confident running Google Ads yourself, or don’t want to do paid lead-gen at all.
You can wait 12+ months for organic SEO to compound from a basic site.
Lead volume isn’t your bottleneck.

Pick $299 (or similar) if:

Lead volume IS your bottleneck — feast and famine, can’t predict next month.
You don’t want to think about marketing. You want to be on the tools.
You’re prepared to spend $500/mo on ads to make the lead engine actually run.
You want measurable accountability — “5 leads or it’s refunded” matters more than “trust us, it’ll work”.
You’d rather pay $299 a month and know jobs are coming than pay $79 a month and hope.

The maths only works if the extra leads pay for the extra fee. For most tradies, 1 extra job a month from the upgraded service covers the $220 difference 5x over.

What to NOT do

The expensive mistake: pay for $79 thinking it’s lead generation, then pay for $299 a year later when you realise it’s not. You’ve spent $1,500 on the $79 service over 18 months and got no marketing engine to show for it. That money would’ve bought you 5 months of the $299 product running properly.

If lead-gen is the actual problem, buy lead-gen. If a digital business card is the actual problem, buy a digital business card. Don’t buy the wrong thing because the price tag is friendlier.

How to decide in 3 questions

“How many leads do I get per month right now?” If under 8, leads are your bottleneck.
“Do I have time to manage my own Google profile, run my own ads, and reply to every enquiry within an hour?” If no, you need someone doing it.
“Am I willing to spend $500/mo on Google Ads to make the system work?” If yes, the $299 service makes sense. If no, it doesn’t — the guarantee depends on ads running.

3 yeses → managed lead-gen. 0 yeses → cheap site, do the rest yourself, see how it goes.

The honest answer for most tradies who can answer “yes” to those 3 is: managed lead-gen pays for itself. But only if you actually need it.

Rigup is the $299/mo option above. See exactly what’s included or book a 15-minute call to walk through your specific patch and decide if it’s a fit. We’ll tell you honestly if it’s not.

What you actually get for $79/mo vs $299/mo tradie websites