• Equisolv creates both corporate and IR websites but does not provide any pricing information on their website. Their brochure does highlight that they charge a flat rate with "no hidden fees or overages."
• An examination of other sites found that pricing data is not generally available. Other providers examined included West Unified Communications Services, Sutton Integrated Solutions, Q4, LimeGoat, and Pite Creative.
• We then looked for articles that were published by industry experts that may have discussed the costs associated with creating and hosting an IR website. We found a blog post by Intrado, a company that creates IR sites, that outlined the three main design strategies for an IR site: match the corporate website, choose a design theme, or design from scratch. As is probably expected, matching the corporate site is generally the cheapest option, while a scratch design is the most expensive. Intrado also stated that matching the corporate site is "by far the most commonly deployed tactic."
• As suggested in the project outline, we also attempted to locate IR manager community forums to see if there was any public discussion of the costs. This led us to IR Magazine which had articles on IR websites included one titled "How to create an effective IR website section," and another titled "The do's and don'ts of designing an IR website." Neither article provided any cost data and we also could not locate any public forums on the site. Nothing else was found that would lead us to public forums for IR managers.
• At this point we shifted our strategy to look for data on the cost of creating corporate websites in general. Since Intrado had indicated that most companies choose to match their IR site to their corporate website, it is likely that the costs associated with a corporate build would be similar to those for an IR site.
• According to Web FX, website design can range from $12,000 to $150,000 and site maintenance can range from $400 to $60,000 per year. This costs can vary significantly depending on the type of business.
• Digital.com provided an analysis of the costs to build a website broken out by business type. They reported costs of $2,000-$8,000 for a small business, $10,000-$25,000 for a medium-sized business, $5,000-$40,000 for an ecommerce site, and $25,000-$40,000 for a large business website. They also reported hosting can range from $10 to $99 per month.

Summary of Findings

• Our initial research indicates that there is little to no publicly available data on the cost of creating and/or hosting an IR site. While data was available on the cost for a business site, this may not be a close enough proxy for the data to be reliable.
• We were also unable to find any public forums where IR managers congregate and share information.
• In our experience, pricing data is very difficult to find unless companies choose to make it public on their websites.