Guide 7 min read
IR website for micro-cap companies and what it costs
What a Nasdaq Capital Market, NYSE American or OTCQX company needs on its IR site, the three ways to buy one, what each costs and which fits your next twelve months.
An IR website for a micro-cap company needs six things on day one: an overview with investment highlights, press releases, a live SEC filings feed, a stock quote and chart, an events and presentations archive, and email alerts. There are three ways to buy it. Data modules dropped into your existing site start around $3,600 a year, a managed custom site from an IR agency is quoted case by case, and an IR workspace with the site included, such as Issuers, costs $17,988 a year with the investor CRM and approvals built in.
If you run a company worth somewhere between $50 million and $300 million, you probably don't have an IR department. You have a CFO who handles investors between closing the books and talking to the auditors, maybe with help from an outside IR firm. The website is often the first thing a fund analyst opens after seeing your ticker in a screen, and for a company with one or no analysts covering it, the site does more of the selling than any person does.
This guide is for the CFO or CEO of a US micro-cap on the Nasdaq Capital Market, NYSE American or OTCQX who is buying an IR website now, either for the first time after an uplisting or at the renewal of an old contract.
What a micro-cap IR website has to include
Funds and retail investors look for the same pages on every IR site. When one is missing, the visitor assumes the company is hiding something or simply isn't organized. The minimum set:
- Overview and investment highlights. Three to five sentences on what you do, where the revenue comes from and why the next two years look different. This is the page analysts read first and the one most micro-caps leave out of date.
- Press releases. Every release, dated, in reverse order, posted at the same minute it crosses the wire.
- SEC filings. A live EDGAR feed with 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, proxy and Section 16 filings (Forms 3, 4 and 5), filterable by type. Insider buying is one of the first things micro-cap investors check.
- Stock information. Quote, chart and historical prices, with the data delay stated.
- Events and presentations. The current investor deck, conference presentations and earnings webcast replays.
- Governance. Board, committee charters, code of conduct and the bylaws, which listing rules expect you to make available.
- Email alerts and IR contact. A sign up for releases and filings, and a named contact address that someone actually reads.
- Analyst coverage. If you have any, list the firms and analysts. If you don't, leave the page out.
There is also a disclosure reason to get this right. In its 2008 guidance on company websites, the SEC said a website can count as a recognized channel for distributing information under Regulation FD only if investors know to look there and the information is posted in a timely, accessible way. A site that posts results an hour late, or loses its archive every redesign, can't carry that weight. Many IR teams also archive a dated PDF copy of each page they publish at release time, so they can show exactly what investors saw and when.
Three ways to buy an IR website and what each costs
The market splits into three kinds of offer. They are priced very differently because they do different amounts of the work.
| Option | Typical yearly cost | Who updates it | What else is included | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data modules inside your own site | B2i lists IR Website Essentials at $3,600 a year on its pricing page | Feeds update filings, releases and stock data; your web team handles the rest | Email alerts; usually nothing beyond the website | Companies with a WordPress corporate site and few investor meetings |
| Managed custom IR site from an agency or IR suite (Q4, Notified, Equisolve, B2i full service, ACCESS Newswire) | No public price, quoted through sales, often with a separate build fee | The vendor's client services team, on request | Varies; some bundle webcasting or wire distribution | Companies that want a fully designed site and nobody inside touching it |
| IR workspace with the site included (Issuers Public plan) | $17,988 a year billed yearly, or $2,999 month to month | Your team, after IR, CFO and counsel approval | Investor CRM, meeting briefs, ownership changes, data rooms, disclosure workflow, earnings prep | Companies that meet funds every quarter or are preparing a raise |
The data module route is the cheapest by a wide margin, and for a company whose IR program is the website and two press releases a quarter, it's the right buy. Paying five times more for features you won't use is poor value.
The managed route makes sense when design matters to the brand and the company has a budget for a project. Ask for the one time build fee, the yearly hosting and support fee and the cost of add ons such as webcasting as three separate numbers, or the quotes won't be comparable.
The workspace route earns its price when the website is only the visible part of the job. If you keep investor contacts in a spreadsheet, check ownership by reading 13F filings by hand and approve releases over email, Issuers puts that work in one place with the IR website hosting included. There is a direct comparison on the B2i alternative page, and the managed vendors are compared on the investor relations website providers compared page.
Which option fits a micro-cap
The right purchase depends less on market cap than on what the next twelve months look like.
A pre-revenue company with few investor meetings
A clinical stage biotech or an exploration company that reports quarterly and holds an annual meeting mostly needs filings, releases and the deck to be current. Data modules on the corporate site cover that. Put the saved budget into a good deck and a clear overview page.
A company that just uplisted from OTC to Nasdaq
Uplisting changes the IR workload. You start non-deal roadshows, small cap conferences and calls with funds that couldn't own you before. Each of those meetings needs a record: who attended, what was said, what was promised as a follow up, and whether the fund bought afterwards. This is the point where an investor relations CRM next to the website pays for itself, because the alternative is reconstructing meetings from calendar invites. If you are still on OTC Markets, the guide to investor relations software for OTCQX companies covers what changes and what doesn't.
A company preparing a raise
A follow-on, a registered direct or a convertible brings a data room, a target investor list and a tight disclosure calendar. Material information has to reach everyone at once, and the release, the 8-K and the website have to match. Running releases and site pages through the same disclosure management software with one approval chain removes the most common mistake, a website that says something the filing doesn't.
How much does an IR website cost for a small public company?
A small public company pays from about $3,600 a year for IR data modules added to its own website, to an agency quote for a custom managed IR site, to $17,988 a year for an IR workspace that includes the hosted site, investor CRM and approvals. The right figure depends on how many investor meetings and raises the company runs.
Watch for costs that sit outside the headline price: per change fees on managed sites, a separate charge for webcasting, accessibility remediation and the internal hours your team spends chasing updates. A cheaper site that takes a day to post results has a hidden cost on every earnings morning.
Questions to ask any IR website vendor
- Who owns the content, the design and the domain if we leave, and in what format do we get the archive back?
- What is the notice period and the auto renewal term?
- Can a release page go live at a set time, at the same minute as the wire, without a ticket?
- How fast does a new SEC filing appear on the site after EDGAR accepts it?
- Is there an approval step and a log of who published what and when?
- What is the delay on the stock quote, and is it stated on the page?
- Which accessibility standard does the site meet, and who fixes issues?
- Do you handle 301 redirects from our old investor URLs when we move to you?
Answers to the first two questions matter most for a micro-cap. A contract you can't leave, or an archive you can't take with you, costs far more over five years than the difference between two quotes.
How to switch IR website providers without losing search rankings
- Export the full list of live investor URLs before you give notice, including old releases and PDF links.
- Map each old URL to its new address and set up 301 redirects for all of them.
- Point the ir subdomain with a CNAME record on a quiet week, never in the two weeks before earnings.
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console the same day and check that the company name and ticker searches still land on the investor pages.
Rankings for your company name and ticker usually recover within days when the redirects are complete. Missing redirects are what cause lasting damage, because analyst bookmarks and old links from news sites start returning errors.
Next step
Type your ticker on the Issuers homepage to see a sample investor brief built from your own public filings, the same kind of brief the workspace prepares before each fund meeting. When you're ready to compare costs, every plan and price is on the investor relations software pricing page, and the Public plan with the hosted IR website starts from checkout without a sales call.