The short answer
A small business website in Alaska costs somewhere between $1,500 and $40,000. Most of the businesses we build for land between $4,000 and $10,000.
That range is wide enough to be useless on its own, which is why almost nobody publishes it. We publish ours on the pricing page with the actual figures next to each tier. What follows is the part the price tag does not explain.
The four bands you will actually get quoted
Ask five people in this market and you will get quotes from four different categories of provider. They are not competing for the same job, even when they sound like they are.
The site builder, roughly $200 to $600 a year
Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy. You do the work. The subscription is the cost and the ceiling is your own time. For a one-person operation that gets found by word of mouth, this is often the correct answer and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling.
The freelancer, roughly $800 to $3,000
Usually a builder template with your logo dropped in, sometimes genuinely custom. The variable is not skill, it is availability. The common failure is not a bad site, it is a good site nobody can reach the author of eight months later.
The local studio, roughly $3,000 to $15,000
Custom design, a real page structure, on-page SEO done deliberately. This is the band where a website starts being an asset that brings in work rather than a brochure that proves you exist. It is also where we sit.
The Outside agency, $15,000 to $75,000 and up
A firm in Seattle or Denver taking Alaska clients. Some are excellent. All of them are pricing for their own market, and a good number add a quiet premium for the awkwardness of a client four time zones away who they will never meet.
Why quotes read high up here
Three real reasons, and one fake one.
Real: the market is small, so a studio here does fewer projects a year and each one has to carry more overhead. Real: fewer competitors means less downward pressure on price. Real: businesses in Alaska often need things a Lower 48 template never accounts for, like shipping logic that does not quietly quote a customer in Bethel the same rate as one in Ohio.
Fake: the idea that building for Alaska is technically harder. It is not. The code is the same code. If a quote is high because of where you are rather than what you need, that is a markup, not a cost.
What actually moves the number
Page count is the number everybody asks about and the weakest predictor of anything. Ten near-identical pages take less work than three pages that each do something different.
What genuinely moves a quote:
- Custom design versus a template. The single biggest line item. Designing from nothing takes days that picking a theme does not.
- Who writes the words. Content is the most underpriced part of every project in this industry. If the quote assumes you supply it and you do not, the quote is wrong.
- Integrations. Booking systems, payment processors, inventory, a CRM. Every connection to somebody else's software is a place the project can stall on their timeline instead of yours.
- Selling online. A store is a different category of build. Ecommerce development carries tax handling, shipping rules and a checkout that has to work perfectly on the first try.
- Search coverage. One page about everything you do will rank for none of it. Real per-service and per-area pages cost more because there is more to write.
- Anything nobody has a template for. Portals, calculators, dashboards. Custom applications are quoted per project because nothing else is honest.
The number nobody quotes you: year two
Here is the cost that ambushes people. The build is a one-time number. The website is not a one-time thing.
Year two carries hosting, a domain renewal, security updates, and somebody to call when the contact form silently stops sending. Our hosting runs from $37 to $397 a month depending on what the site actually needs, and maintenance is a separate decision rather than a bundled surprise.
The failure mode is not expensive maintenance. It is no maintenance, discovered in month fourteen when the form has been broken since month nine and nobody knows how long the leads have been going nowhere.
Ask what a broken contact form costs to fix in eighteen months. The answer tells you more about a quote than the price does.
How to read a quote you have been handed
Five questions. Ask all five before you compare two numbers, because two quotes that answer these differently are not comparable at any price.
- Who owns the site when it is paid for? Get it in writing. Ours is written into the terms: paid in full and it is yours, financed and it transfers when the payments finish.
- Whose name is the domain registered in? If the answer is not yours, walk.
- Can I leave and take the site? A monthly plan you can never exit is a lease being sold as a purchase.
- Can I edit it myself, and what happens if I break something?
- What is the hourly rate for work outside the scope? Every project has some. Knowing the number in advance turns an argument into an invoice.
What we charge, and why the numbers are public
Four tiers. $1,500 for a clean five-page site, $3,997 for a full custom multi-page build, $9,997 for a large site with per-service and per-area pages, and $39,997 as the starting point for full custom development. Finance any of them over 24 months, or pay upfront and take 25% off.
We publish them because a hidden price is almost always a variable one. When the number depends on how expensive your business looks, the quote is about you rather than the work. The pricing page has the full breakdown including hosting per tier.
If the honest answer for your situation is a $16 a month Squarespace subscription, we will say that on the call. It happens more than you would think.