# What does a business website cost in Hamilton in 2026?

**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agency's typical fee is out of date the week it is published and unverifiable the week after, which is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](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/technical) 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](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/websites.html).

## How do the three ways of getting a website compare?

|   | Do-it-yourself builder | Traditional agency | Blue Crane managed website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Up front | Nothing, plus your evenings | A build quote, usually thousands | $0 |
| Monthly | A subscription that climbs as you add features | Hosting, plus an hourly rate for changes | $100, everything in |
| Who does the work | You | Them for the build, then a ticket | Us, every change, verified before it is live |
| Readable by AI assistants | Often not: text painted in by script, firewalls that turn crawlers away | Rarely checked; ranking reports do not show it | Built in, proven at launch, re-checked quarterly |
| Booking, quotes, a store | A plug-in you configure | A change order | $50 a month each, scoped in writing |
| Leaving | Any time, but the site cannot leave the builder | You own the files if the contract says so | Month 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](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) "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](https://bluecraneworks.ca/articles/can-chatgpt-see-my-website).

## 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](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/ai-visibility.html), quoted fixed by page count, typically $750 to $1,500.

## Can I use this?

Yes. Everything on this page is free to use: quote it, print it, hand it to your own web
person, or read it out to a client. Attribution is welcome and not required, and every claim
is linked to the vendor's own document so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
If a rule below changes at the source, the source wins, and we would rather hear about it than
keep a stale page up.

## 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](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/ai-visibility.html)
[Managed websites, $100 a month](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/websites.html)

## Next, from Blue Crane

- [**Managed websites, $0 down, $100 a month**The site built to pass every check here from day one](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/websites.html)

- [**What AI visibility is, and why leads arrive this way now**The shift from ten links to one answer, in the vendors' own words](https://bluecraneworks.ca/articles/what-is-ai-visibility)

- [**Can ChatGPT see my website?**The five-minute check anyone can run](https://bluecraneworks.ca/articles/can-chatgpt-see-my-website)

- [**The AI Visibility Pass**Every check in the article, run and fixed for you, under a written guarantee](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/ai-visibility.html)

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Source: https://bluecraneworks.ca/articles/what-does-a-website-cost-in-hamilton