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Getting found by AI

What does a business website cost in Hamilton in 2026?

Published
AuthorTrevor, Founder
Reading time6 min
Written inHamilton, Ontario

With Blue Crane Works, a professional multi-page business website costs $0 up front and $100 a month on a twelve-month term, then month to month, and the number includes design, build, hosting, the domain, email routing, content changes and a quarterly SEO, GEO and AI visibility update. Booking, a store, a quote calculator or an AI assistant add $50 a month each. The two other ways to get a site are priced very differently: a do-it-yourself builder charges a monthly fee and leaves the work to you; a traditional agency quotes the build in the thousands before anyone starts, then hosting and changes on top.

Why is this article using Blue Crane's own numbers and nobody else's?

Because ours are written down and theirs change. A price comparison that quotes a builder's plan or an agency's typical fee is out of date the week it is published and unverifiable the week after, which is exactly the kind of invented precision an answer engine should not be fed. So this page states the one price we control, in full, and describes the other two ways of buying a website in words you can check against any quote you are holding.

What does $100 a month actually buy?

The whole job, without a build invoice. Design and build are done first and paid for through the plan, which is what the twelve-month term covers; after that it runs month to month. The plan includes the hosting, the domain, DNS and email routing, content edits when you send them, and a quarterly re-check that keeps the site readable by Google, Bing and the AI assistants as their rules change. Every page ships with a Markdown twin for the AI tools that ask for one, and every launch is audited against the search engines' own technical requirements before it goes live. The first ten founding sites get their first three months free in exchange for a case study and a Google review at ninety days. Paying the year up front is twelve months for the price of ten, $1,000. The full plan, with the add-on menu and the priority tier, is on the managed websites page.

How do the three ways of getting a website compare?

Three ways to get a business website in Hamilton, compared without competitor prices
 Do-it-yourself builderTraditional agencyBlue Crane managed website
Up frontNothing, plus your eveningsA build quote, usually thousands$0
MonthlyA subscription that climbs as you add featuresHosting, plus an hourly rate for changes$100, everything in
Who does the workYouThem for the build, then a ticketUs, every change, verified before it is live
Readable by AI assistantsOften not: text painted in by script, firewalls that turn crawlers awayRarely checked; ranking reports do not show itBuilt in, proven at launch, re-checked quarterly
Booking, quotes, a storeA plug-in you configureA change order$50 a month each, scoped in writing
LeavingAny time, but the site cannot leave the builderYou own the files if the contract says soMonth to month after twelve; remaining months payable inside the term

What is the cost that never appears on the quote?

The cheapest website is the one nobody can find, and the cheapest way to build one is on a platform whose defaults quietly block the machines that now answer people's questions. A builder's bot protection can refuse the crawler that feeds ChatGPT search, a theme can paint every word in by JavaScript so a crawler receives an empty shell, and one setting can remove the site from Copilot's citations and Google's AI answers while every dashboard stays green. Google's own guidance lists, as the first thing to get right, ensuring that crawling is allowed "in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure." A site that fails that test costs you every lead that would have come from an assistant, and the invoice never shows it. Five minutes tells you whether yours does.

What changes the price?

Not the page count, within reason, and not the city: Hamilton, Niagara, the GTA and remote clients anywhere in Ontario pay the same $100. What moves it is scope beyond a website. A 3D configurator, an online store, a quote calculator or a customer portal is $50 a month each. A company that wants two sites, the Blue Crane App set up for its trade, monthly rather than quarterly visibility updates and priority support is the Managed Partner tier at $250 a month. And a business that wants to keep the site it already has, and only wants it made readable by the assistants, is not a website customer at all: that is the one-time AI Visibility Pass, quoted fixed by page count, typically $750 to $1,500.

Want this checked and fixed on your site?

The AI Visibility Pass runs every check in this article against your live site, fixes what it finds, and hands you the proof. Fixed quote, written guarantee. On a managed website it is included from launch.

See the AI Visibility Pass Managed websites, $100 a month