Short answer: anywhere from free to $30,000 or more. A free federation template gets your club on the map, a budget build costs around $1,000 to $1,500, a custom club website usually lands between $3,000 and $10,000, and a full platform with member portal and bookings sits above that. The right tier depends on what your club needs the website to do.
The free tier: federation templates
Bowls Australia and some state bodies offer free template sites to affiliated clubs. They cost nothing and take an afternoon to fill in, which is genuinely useful for a small club with no budget. The trade-offs: every club looks the same, the tools are limited to basic pages, and plenty of clubs never finish the setup. You have probably seen sites still showing the default "Just another club site" tagline. If the website is your club's first impression, a template nobody finished is working against you.
The budget tier: around $1,000 to $1,500
Several agencies sell club website packages around the $1,000 mark, usually WordPress with a pre-made theme. You get an information site: hours, contact, a few photos. It is a fair deal if that is all you need, but check what is not included: hosting and domain fees each year, charges for every content change, and what happens when a plugin breaks in two years. Ask who updates the site after launch, because at this price the answer is usually "you, in WordPress".
The custom tier: $3,000 to $10,000
A website designed around your club instead of a theme: your colours and photos, pages for functions and venue hire that actually bring in bookings, events your volunteers can edit without touching code, and technical SEO so people searching "bowls club near me" find you. This is the tier where the website starts paying for itself through visitors, functions and new members.
The platform tier: $10,000 and up
Website plus the system behind it: members join and renew online, bookings run through the site, the secretary sees everything in one admin panel, and routine admin like welcome emails and weekly reports happens automatically. For clubs drowning in paper forms and spreadsheet chaos, this tier saves real volunteer hours every single week.
What moves the price
- How much content needs migrating from the old site
- Whether you need bookings, and how complex they are (rinks, tee times, events)
- Online payments for memberships and functions
- Integrations with tools the club already uses
- Photography: clubs with good photos always end up with better websites
Five questions to ask any provider
- What does it cost per year after launch, all in?
- Who can update content, and do we pay per change?
- Do we own the website and the domain if we leave you?
- Can you show us another club you have built for?
- What happens to our Google ranking during the migration?
A fair provider answers all five without flinching. If you want those answers for your club specifically, our free assessment covers exactly this: we review what you have, tell you which tier actually fits, and give your committee a fixed quote to discuss.