Hire Someone

Even the "I'll just build it myself" route has a cost. It just hides in different places.

At the very minimum, you're looking at a domain name at around $20–$40 per year, hosting at somewhere between $25 and $100 per month depending on the quality, and whatever platform you build on — whether that's Wix, Squarespace, or a self-hosted WordPress setup — which typically adds another $20–$60 per month once you account for decent plugins and a reasonable theme. Our website tools guide walks through builders, hosting, and the trade-offs. Stack on the SEO tools, email integrations, and form builders that a working site actually requires, and you're looking at somewhere between $500 and $1,500 a year before you've paid a single person.

That's the cash cost. The time cost is harder to quantify but is far more significant for most owners. Getting a site to a reasonable standard takes most people upwards of 40 hours to begin with. Then there's the ongoing time — fixing things when they break, updating content, chasing down why your contact form stopped working, figuring out why your booking widget looks wrong on iPhone.

The result is usually a website that exists. But existence and performance are very different things. A site can be live, functional, and completely failing to convert visitors into bookings — and you'd never know it unless you were looking at the right numbers in something like Google Analytics and tying them to actual bookings. Most owners aren't.

This is where most escape room businesses land. You don't want to do everything yourself, but you're not ready — or not able — to hand it all over to one provider. So you hire bits.

A freelancer builds the site. Someone else manages your Google Ads. You try to figure out SEO yourself for a while, then eventually pay someone for that too. Your hosting is on a separate account. Your maintenance either doesn't happen, or you pay someone hourly when something breaks.

On paper, this looks affordable. In practice, it's the most expensive and time-consuming way to run a web presence.

The Website Build

A freelancer will typically charge between $1,500 and $6,000 for a website build, depending on complexity. A small agency will start at $5,000 and go significantly higher. What you usually get for that is a working site, a reasonable design, and a basic setup. What you often don't get is strategy, conversion thinking, or any ongoing support once the handover happens.

This is worth understanding before you sign anything. Most freelancers are designers or developers — not marketers. They'll build what you ask for. Whether it performs in the way your business needs it to — clear design, fast load times, a path to book — is a different question entirely.

Maintenance

Websites don't sit still. Plugins update, things conflict, security vulnerabilities get discovered, and your booking widget occasionally decides to stop working at 8pm on a Friday. Proper ongoing maintenance typically costs somewhere between $100 and $400 per month when handled by a professional. Skip this, and those problems build quietly in the background until something significant breaks at the worst possible moment. If you run WordPress, that stack is covered in more detail in website tools & hosting.

SEO

Getting found on Google is where things start to add up seriously. A freelance SEO specialist will typically charge between $500 and $1,500 per month for the kind of local, booking-focused SEO work that an escape room actually needs — Google Business Profile and Maps optimisation, landing pages targeting specific search terms, and content that builds long-term authority. Agencies charge more, often starting at $1,500 and reaching $5,000 or beyond per month for comprehensive campaigns.

Google Ads

If you want bookings now rather than months from now, paid advertising comes into play — typically Google Ads. Management fees for an account typically run from around $300 to $1,500 per month, depending on the agency and scope — and that's before you factor in the actual ad spend itself. In a smaller market, a budget of around $3,000 per month in ad spend might generate on the order of a few hundred clicks. Whether those clicks convert into bookings depends entirely on the quality of the website they land on.

This is the thing most people miss: ads don't fix a weak site. They just send more people to it.

This is the "do it properly" option that most owners consider at some stage, usually after one too many late nights fixing something that shouldn't have broken.

A full agency build for a small business in New Zealand typically starts at $5,000 and can reach $15,000 or more for a custom site with proper strategy baked in. At the higher end — custom builds with conversion-focused architecture and integrated SEO foundations — you're looking at $10,000 to $50,000 and beyond for the right agency doing the right work.

What you get is meaningful. You get a team that thinks about strategy, user experience, and structure — not just how the site looks. You get a technical foundation that doesn't need rebuilding six months later. You get SEO fundamentals built in from day one rather than retrofitted.

What you often don't get is ongoing iteration at any reasonable speed, deep familiarity with your specific industry, or the sense that anyone on the team has ever actually run an escape room and understood what fills it. Agencies build good websites. Whether those websites are built around the particular psychology of someone deciding whether to book an escape room this weekend is a different question.

There's also the ongoing cost reality. A large upfront build doesn't eliminate the need for monthly investment — hosting, maintenance, SEO, and advertising still need to be funded. The build is the beginning, not the end.

More recently, there's been a shift toward bundled services — one monthly fee that covers the website build, hosting, maintenance, and sometimes SEO or content as well. Instead of managing five separate providers and invoices, you manage one relationship.

At the low end, you can find basic subscription site services for around $100 per month. More serious setups — with proper strategy, conversion thinking, and niche expertise — tend to sit between $200 and $1,000 per month depending on what's included.

The logic is straightforward: no large upfront cost, continuous improvement over time, and an alignment of incentives. A provider on a monthly retainer has a reason to keep making the site better. A freelancer who's been paid and handed over the keys doesn't.

The limitation to watch for is what's actually included versus what's an add-on. "Website included" and "SEO included" can mean very different things depending on who you're dealing with, and the gap between a subscription service that ticks boxes and one that actively drives bookings is significant.

On paper, all of these options look similar. You get a website. You get hosting. You get "SEO." The language used to describe them is almost identical across the board.

But the outcome is very different — and that gap tends to be invisible until you start measuring properly. Most providers in this space are selling design, features, and technology. Very few are selling conversion rates, booking flow optimisation, and an understanding of how someone actually decides to book an escape room.

Nobody actually wants hosting. Nobody wants an SEO report. Nobody wants a website. What escape room owners want is more bookings and fewer empty slots. Everything else is just the machinery behind that goal — and the machinery only matters insofar as it produces the outcome.

That's the lens worth applying to every conversation you have with anyone selling web services: not "what do they offer?" but "what outcome does their offer produce, and can they demonstrate that with evidence?"

If your current situation looks like this — you built the site yourself, it looks fine, you get traffic, but bookings feel lower than they should be — then yes. It's probably time.

Not because you can't build a website. But because at a certain point, maintaining a website yourself stops being a sensible use of your time, and improving a website's performance requires a different kind of expertise than building one.

The owners we've spoken to who made the jump describe the same thing: they were spending hours a month on website-related tasks, not because those tasks were difficult, but because they were endless. The moment they handed that off to someone who actually specialised in it, they got time back — and the site usually improved as a result.

The flip side is also true. Hiring the wrong person, or hiring too early before you understand what you actually need, is an expensive lesson. A $5,000 website build from a generalist freelancer who has never thought about booking flow or local search intent is not a better outcome than continuing to improve your existing site yourself while you work out what good actually looks like.

Understanding what good looks like — in design, in speed, in SEO, and in conversion — is the most useful thing you can develop before you spend a dollar on any of these services. That's what this site and our blog are for.