My bike has a small front rack on it and I'm looking for a suitable bag to use for my commute to work. It seems the only front bag out there are handlebar bags which I'm not interested in. I do like the Surly Petite Porteur House Bag but in Australia it costs $220

Can anyone recommend a good bag or would you say the Surly Petite is worth the money?

Huh $220 AU = $168 USD. Looks like it can be had here in the States for $105 USD. Guess shipping and import duty is high(?). Lots of other options (EX: Swift, Velo Orange), but not for less money than that, and in a lot of cases, much more $$$.. The Surly Petite looks like a pretty good deal to me. A front basket is an inexpensive option that could work instead.

I've thought about going to a rack-mounted front bag a few times, but as you've found out, the prices are pretty steep. (At least you've got the rack!)

Ortlieb bar bags have a nice offset mount so you can grab the bars "under" (actually behind) them; Arkel has or had a similar bag using a Klik-fix mount (which is a whole lot easier to put on than the Ortlieb mount!).

All of which is to say, I can't help much. Good luck!

Ah so these bags are expensive. I thought it might have just been heavy handed retailers (the only 2 in the country) who carry the Surly bag.

Surly prices always seem high to me for what they're offering, but I'm a cheapskate.

How big of a bag are you looking for? I recently posted a review of an Axiom handlebar bag that's decently spacious, but possibly not what you're looking for. For my bikes that have front racks, I have two options. One is a somewhat small handlebar bag that I got from Amazon for around $25. It came with an ugly mounting bracket that made it sit above the bars. I removed that and replace it with mounting hardware to use with a Velo Orange decaleur.





For commuting (if I can think back to when I had the option of going in to the office), this was sufficient unless I needed to carry a laptop (in which case I used either rear panniers or a backpack).

For bigger loads, I have a VO handlebar bag.





This is quite roomy and I guess similar to the Surly bag. It's hard to tell from these pictures, but this one has about twice the capacity of the one above. This sort of bag is often as expensive as the Surly or even more. You can get them in fairly big sizes.

I don't know how readily you can get Velo Orange parts in Australia, but you could use their decaleur receiver (https://velo-orange.com/collections/...ever-5mm-posts) and bag mount (https://velo-orange.com/collections/...ount-6mm-posts) to adapt virtually any bag for use with a front rack. I've seen people do this with soft sided coolers and camera bags. VO probably has an Asian supplier (a lot of their stuff appears to be rebranded Dia Compe), so you might be able to get a better deal from a more local outlet.

Thanks. I only really need it for when I'm riding to work (I don't carry a laptop) so bags that size would be fine. My rack is lower so a handlebar bag wouldn't really work though.

You might want to consider Military surplus. You can pick up a small bag that can be used for a handlebar bag.