Honest pricing
Quoted up-front, no surprises. If something changes scope, we tell you what it costs before we do it.
How Suncoast Local got built.
After years of building websites for my own businesses - and finally discovering I could build genuinely custom ones with Claude Code - I looked at what local agencies were selling small businesses in Sarasota, Bradenton, and Venice, and decided to build something dramatically better.
How Suncoast Local got here.
I'm not a career software developer, and I'm not going to pretend to be one. I'm a business owner. Over the years I built and ran several of my own businesses, and I built the website for every one of them myself - not because I was a coder, but because the agencies quoting me wanted big-city prices for work I could see was thin.
Early on that meant Dreamweaver. For a long stretch after, it meant the usual platforms - Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, WordPress, Hostinger's builder. They got the job done, but I always hit the same ceiling: a template only bends so far.
Then I found Claude Code - Anthropic's AI development tool - and used it to build the websites for my own businesses. That changed everything. Suddenly I could build genuinely custom, fast, modern sites from scratch, with none of the template limits. Two things hit me fast: I was far more excited about building the sites than about the business they were selling, and nothing being offered to small businesses around here came close to what I could now build. So Suncoast Local was born.
Here's the part I won't hide: I build with Claude Code. The AI writes code under my direction; I bring the judgment - what to build, how it should work, the business sense, the real-device QA, and the part where an actual human picks up the phone. That combination is the edge. It's how a small Suncoast shop hands a local business a fully custom, AI-search-ready site - with a custom chatbot built in - in weeks, not months, and at a fraction of agency prices.
I'd rather tell you exactly how it's made than dress it up. If that's the kind of straight talk you want from the person building your website, we'll get along.
Close the gap between what's sold and what's actually built.
Small businesses on the Suncoast are underserved. Most local agencies ship WordPress templates that look like the next agency's WordPress templates, and charge three to four times what the work actually costs. Most of them know better and charge the premium anyway.
That's the gap Suncoast Local closes.
Every project gets treated like it was for the shop itself: the same build standards, the same attention to Core Web Vitals, schema and accessibility, and the same willingness to say out loud when a billable task isn't worth doing.
How the build actually works.
Why we skip WordPress
WordPress runs roughly 40% of the web. It's also the source of nearly every plugin vulnerability, every "site is suddenly slow" complaint, and every "the developer disappeared and now no one can update it" story. Templates compound the problem. They ship with code for features you'll never use and miss the features your business actually needs.
Custom-coded sites ship the exact code your business needs and not one byte more. They load in under a second on a good connection. They score 100 on Lighthouse out of the box. They don't break when a plugin you didn't know existed pushes a bad update at 2am.
Who you actually talk to
Most agencies sell layers. A salesperson sells you, an account manager onboards you, a project manager runs your build, a designer designs it, a developer codes it, and somewhere in the middle the original promise gets diluted. Every handoff loses information, and the strategy you bought into in the first meeting rarely survives contact with the production team.
Suncoast Local works differently. The senior person you talk to first stays involved through the entire engagement - kickoff, design, build, launch, and ongoing support. There are no junior handoffs, no offshore subcontracting, and no game of telephone between the people who promised the work and the people who deliver it. The strategy that gets sold is the strategy that ships.
Why Suncoast
Local SEO is local. The agencies running campaigns for Sarasota plumbers and Venice dentists from offices in Phoenix or Mumbai don't know which strip mall is the landmark for "next to the Publix" or which subdivision is actually in your service area.
We do. We grew up here, we live here, we shop where you do. We know that Lakewood Ranch is technically Manatee County, that Palmer Ranch isn't Sarasota proper, and that Englewood gets confused with Englewood, Colorado in half the search results. That kind of contextual knowledge isn't in any keyword tool - it comes from being on the ground, year after year.
Mike Ferreira
Founder
Mike Ferreira is the founder of Suncoast Local. A longtime small-business owner, he built the websites for his own businesses for years - first with Dreamweaver, later on platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and WordPress - before discovering Claude Code, Anthropic's AI development tool. Using it, he builds fully custom, AI-search-ready websites in custom PHP for local businesses across the Suncoast - fast, owner-editable sites with local-SEO pages, a custom AI chatbot, and a self-writing blog, each built and operated in-house. He builds with Claude Code - directing the AI while bringing the business judgment, design decisions, and real-device testing himself - and is candid about exactly how the work gets made.
What we've built before this.
Before launching Suncoast Local, the founder spent a full year deep in AI-integrated development with Claude Code - production systems built in custom PHP: custom chatbots trained on private business data, multi-step AI workflows running in cron jobs, AI-driven content pipelines, and dozens of third-party integrations across MySQL and modern APIs.
That same architecture now powers every site in our portfolio - fast, custom-built local business sites with owner-editable content, a custom AI chatbot, and a self-writing blog - the reason our sites are genuinely built for the ChatGPT-driven search era.
See the PortfolioThree principles, applied to every project.
Tight feedback loops
Weekly progress updates with specific deliverables. You always know what we're working on and when it ships.
Long-term partnership
Most clients stay with us indefinitely on the subscription. We invest in understanding your business so we can grow with it.
Small. Intentionally. Growing carefully.
Suncoast Local is currently small - intentionally. Mike is the founder, the person who directs every build, the strategist who pitches projects, and the person who picks up the phone when you call. Every site we ship is built under his direction, with Claude Code - and every detail goes through him.
That model will change as we grow, but how it changes will be deliberate. Whoever joins next will be a senior craftsperson, not an account manager. The "the person who pitches is the person who builds" principle isn't something we'll sacrifice to scale faster. If we can't grow while keeping that promise, we'll grow more slowly until we can.
Last reviewed: by Mike Ferreira.
Common questions before you hire us.
One developer/designer based on the Suncoast. The person who answers your first email is the same person who designs your site, writes your code, ships it, and supports it after launch. No account managers, no offshore subcontractors, no junior handoffs.
Yes - and we are upfront about it. The founder built the websites for his own businesses from scratch with Claude Code (Anthropic's AI development tool), then founded Suncoast Local to build the same for local businesses - the live sites on our Portfolio page are the work the agency is built on. What that means for you: lower prices than established Suncoast competitors charge for comparable work, more direct attention because the client roster is small, and modern AI-search-ready architecture from day one. What it does NOT mean: a wall of testimonials. We will not fabricate one.
Because WordPress for a small business marketing site is the wrong tool. The 30-50 plugins required to make a modern WordPress site do anything useful become 30-50 attack surfaces, 30-50 update prompts, and 30-50 reasons your Lighthouse score is 38 instead of 98. Custom-coded sites ship a tenth of the code, are far harder to attack, score perfect on Core Web Vitals out of the box, and do not break when an unrelated plugin updates at 2 AM Saturday.
Sarasota / Bradenton / Venice / Lakewood Ranch and surrounding-area small businesses - typically 1-50 employees, often owner-operated. Service businesses (home services, professional practices, restaurants, hospitality), local retail, healthcare practices, real estate, and similar. We are intentionally not chasing enterprise work or Fortune 500 brand projects.
We live and work on the Suncoast. The phone number on the site is the developer. We answer same-business-day during business hours, within an hour for site-down or security issues, and we monitor every client site 24/7. Reputation travels in this market, and we depend on it.