Blue Crane Works designs, builds, hosts and manages websites for businesses in Hamilton, Niagara and the Greater Toronto Area, and remotely for businesses anywhere in Ontario, from a $995 build and $99 a month, or $0 down at $189 a month for the first year. Pay the build in full and it is $895. Care covers hosting, domain and email, content edits, and a quarterly SEO, GEO and AI visibility update, so the site stays readable by Google, Bing and the AI assistants as their rules change. Care runs twelve months, then month to month. Prices in CAD, plus HST.
Verified against the vendors' own published documentation
The grind
- A site from 2019 that nobody knows how to edit, on a builder bill that keeps climbing
- Your name never comes up when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI who to call
- A rebuild quote with no number for what the site costs to keep running
- An SEO retainer that reports rankings and never mentions AI assistants
Where leads actually come from now
The way people pick a local business changed. They used to search Google and skim ten blue links. Now they ask a question and get an answer. Google answers many searches with an AI summary above the results, built from pages that meet Google's own documented requirements for AI features. Microsoft's Copilot answers with citations selected under Bing's published webmaster guidelines. And ChatGPT runs its own crawler and its own index: OpenAI's crawler documentation states plainly that sites its search bot cannot reach "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." OpenAI's current documentation does not name Bing at all, so the thing to get right for ChatGPT is crawler access at your robots file and at your firewall.
The assistant names two or three businesses, and the caller never sees a list of ten. Whether yours is one of the two or three comes down to something unglamorous: can the machine fetch your pages, read them as real text, and find facts worth quoting. Most small-business websites fail that quietly. The builder's firewall turns crawlers away, the text is painted in by script so a bot receives an empty page, or one invisible setting removes the site from Copilot and Google's AI answers with no symptom any ranking report will ever show.
That is the gap we build for. Every site on a Blue Crane plan ships with the full readability playbook below, verified before launch and re-checked on every visibility update.
What makes a managed site visible to AI?
The same technical work we sell on its own as the AI Visibility Pass is built into every managed site from day one, at no extra cost, and re-run for you as the engines change their rules. On a plan you never buy it as an upgrade after launch.
Crawler access, readable text, the files every assistant reads and a clean 404 are part of the build, checked before your site goes live. Nothing is held back to be sold to you afterwards.
Google and Bing change what they require, and a site built correctly in March can quietly fail by September. Your plan includes the re-run, the fixes, and the new numbers.
Assistants read your pages far more cheaply as clean Markdown than as HTML, so every page is served both ways. On our largest build to date the Markdown copies came out 79 percent smaller.
Not a score out of a hundred invented by a tool. The real response every crawler gave your real pages, before and after, in a report you can hand to anyone. If you want to run the first check yourself today, here is the five-minute version.
And it carries the same written guarantee
Every managed site is covered by the Work Guarantee: every major crawler reaching your full pages, every silent block removed, and more of your customers' real questions answered on the site, or you do not pay. What nobody can guarantee is visibility itself, a ranking or a citation, and Bing says so in writing. We put that sentence in the contract instead of hiding it.
What we build
A real multi-page site written from your actual facts: services, prices where you want them, the areas you serve, the questions customers ask before they buy. Designed for your business, not adapted from a theme.
Hosting, domain, DNS and email routing handled. You send changes when you have them; they get made, deployed and verified. No ticket portal, no hourly invoice for a phone-number fix.
Built to Google's and Bing's published rules from day one, with a quarterly SEO, GEO and AI visibility update on every plan so the site keeps up as the engines change.
When you are ready for more than pages, the add-on menu bolts onto the same site and the same monthly bill: a store, a configurator, a portal, an assistant.
What it costs
Every plan is a one-time build plus a monthly Care fee, with three ways to pay. Pay the build in full at signing and it is 10% less. Pay half at signing and half before launch. Or pay nothing down: one monthly price for the first twelve months, then normal Care. Care runs twelve months, then month to month, and a year of Care paid ahead is twelve months for the price of ten. On the $0 down plan, leaving inside the first twelve months makes the remaining months payable, and a site left unpaid for 30 days goes offline. Bigger builds are quoted in writing before anything is signed. All prices in Canadian dollars, plus HST.
Found
$995 build, then $99 / month
Or $0 down: $189 a month for twelve months, then $99. Build paid in full: $895.
A website of up to ten pages, run for you.
- Up to 10 pages, designed and written from your facts
- Hosting, domain, DNS and email routing
- Content edits when you send them
- Quarterly SEO, GEO and AI visibility update
- The full AI readability playbook, verified
- Care: twelve months, then month to month
Booked
$1,995 build, then $199 / month
Or $0 down: $379 a month for twelve months, then $199. Build paid in full: $1,795.
For businesses that take bookings or quotes.
- Everything in Found, up to 20 pages
- Online booking or a quote calculator
- Lead alerts the moment someone reaches out
- Review requests sent to your customers after each job
- A monthly report of what AI says about you
- More add-ons $50 a month each
Run
from $3,995 build, then from $449 / month
Or $0 down: from $799 a month for twelve months, then from $449. Build paid in full: from $3,595.
Your website and your own business app, one system.
- Everything in Booked
- Your own custom application behind it
- Quotes through to signature, job plans, crew hours
- Customer and subcontractor portals
- Priority support, Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- No per-user fees
Add-ons (a 3D configurator, a store, a customer portal, an AI assistant, integrations) are $50 a month each, scoped in writing. A second website is its own plan. Already have a site you want to keep as it is? The one-time AI Visibility Pass does the same readability work on the site you already have, without a rebuild, under the same written guarantee. Want to see the application half first? Here is a live one. Existing clients keep the rate they signed. Running several sites, or want Wire advertising on the same bill? Book the call.
The add-on menu: $50 a month each
Each add-on is scoped in writing first, then built and added to the same monthly bill. Online booking or a quote calculator already comes with the Booked plan.
Your product in real 3D on your own site: spin it, change the colour, pick the options, watch the price update, send the quote. The same engine behind the scroll-driven 3D on our Blackbox page, pointed at what you sell.
Products or appointments with real payments, receipts and confirmation emails. Sell or get booked while you are on a ladder.
Your pricing logic on the page: a visitor answers a few questions and gets a real number and a reason to call, instead of bouncing to a competitor who showed one.
A sign-in area for your customers: job status, documents, invoices, whatever your business hands people today by text and email.
A chat assistant on your site that answers from your real pages, prices and policies, and hands the conversation to you when it should.
The website wired into the tools you already run: leads into your CRM or inbox, bookings into your calendar, orders into your books.
Want a website that feels like a film?
If your business sells on sight, we build custom immersive websites: real 3D, scenes that move as you scroll, and products a customer can turn and configure on the page. It pays where people need to see the thing before they call: a showroom, a finished space, a product.
Most immersive websites carry a hidden cost. The words are drawn by code, so Google and the AI assistants receive a nearly empty page, and the most expensive site in town becomes one no assistant can quote. Ours keep every word in the page itself, with a Markdown copy for AI tools, and they go through the same crawler audit as every Blue Crane site before launch.
It suits showrooms, flooring and finishes, custom builders, boutiques, and anyone whose product sells on sight. A plumber does not need one, and we will say so.
An immersive build is scoped and quoted in writing first, as a build price and a monthly Care fee, with the same three ways to pay as every plan on this page. Ask about an immersive build.
Proof, not promises
We run this exact playbook on our own domain first, and we publish the results when we run it for clients. The largest build so far: a Grimsby garage door company running two Wix sites, one unfinished and one hidden from Google entirely, rebuilt as 76 real pages across two domains, both moved off Wix with company email intact and zero blockers on every launch audit. Read the numbers in the Garage Doorman case study.
Before that: amarettos.ca, a 41-year-old Dundas clothing shop, taken from one page to twenty-eight, with all twelve major AI and search crawlers re-verified fetching the full homepage on 17 September 2026. Read the numbers in the Amarettos case study. That work ships as the one-time AI Visibility Pass; on a managed plan the same playbook is simply included.
What does a website cost in Hamilton in 2026?
With Blue Crane, a professional website of up to ten pages is a $995 build and $99 a month, or $0 down at $189 a month for the first year and $99 after, and the monthly Care covers hosting, the domain, email routing, content changes and a quarterly SEO, GEO and AI visibility update. With online booking or a quote calculator and up to twenty pages it is $1,995 and $199 a month, or $0 down at $379. All in CAD, plus HST. The other two ways to get a site price very differently. A do-it-yourself builder charges a monthly fee and leaves every hour of the work, and every visibility decision, to you. A traditional agency quotes the build, then hosting and an hourly rate for changes on top, with nobody checking whether AI assistants can read the result. The table below is the honest comparison, in words rather than competitor prices, because theirs change and ours is written down.
| Do-it-yourself builder | Traditional agency | Blue Crane managed website | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up front | Nothing, plus your evenings | A build quote, usually thousands | A $995 build, or $0 down at $189 a month for the first year |
| Monthly | A subscription that keeps climbing | Hosting, plus an hourly rate for changes | $99 Care, everything in |
| Who does the work | You | Them, then you, then a ticket | Us, on every change, verified before it goes live |
| Readable by AI assistants | Often not: builders paint text in by script and their firewalls turn crawlers away | Rarely checked; ranking reports do not show it | Built in and proven on launch, re-checked every quarter |
| Booking and quotes | A plug-in you configure | A change order | Included in Booked, or $50 a month as an add-on |
| Contract | Month to month, but the site cannot leave the builder | Project, then whatever the retainer says | Twelve months, then month to month, in writing |
Will my website show up in ChatGPT?
Nobody can promise that your business will be named by ChatGPT, Copilot or Google's AI, and anyone who does is selling something the engines themselves say does not exist. What can be promised is eligibility: every condition those companies publish for a page to be fetched, read and quoted, met and proven on your pages. Google says in its own documentation that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI features beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. Bing says in its guidelines that GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations. So a managed site is built to the ceiling of what the published rules reward, you get the crawler-by-crawler proof, and the Work Guarantee covers the work. The rest is not ours to sell. Here is how to check your current site yourself in five minutes.
Do I need a new website, or can mine be fixed?
If your current site is yours to edit, loads its text as real HTML and lets the crawlers in, it can almost always be fixed in place, and that is exactly what the one-time AI Visibility Pass is for. If it lives on a locked builder that blocks crawlers, paints the words in by script, or cannot be moved off the platform with your domain and email intact, a rebuild on the managed plan is usually cheaper than fighting it, and it comes with someone accountable for it afterwards. The free check further down this page tells you which situation you are in before you spend anything.
Do you only work in Hamilton?
No. Blue Crane Works is based in Hamilton and works on site across Hamilton, Niagara and the Greater Toronto Area, and remotely with businesses anywhere in Ontario. A website does not need us in the room: the discovery call is a phone call, the build is reviewed on a link, and changes are sent by email. Every client site so far, from Grimsby to Dundas to Burlington, was built that way.
If you are local and want the Hamilton-specific version of this, with the prices, the areas we have actually delivered in and the local builds you can open and check, that is web design in Hamilton, Ontario.
What happens after the twelve months?
Care simply carries on month to month at the same rate, and you can stop with a month's notice. On the $0 down plan, month thirteen drops to the normal Care fee, for example from $189 to $99 on a Found site, because the build has been paid off by then. Leaving the $0 down plan inside the first twelve months makes the remaining months payable, which is the only fair way to offer a build with nothing down.
Can ChatGPT find your business? Run the free check
Type your website address and the email the scorecard should go to. In about ten seconds we fetch your homepage the way a browser does and the way OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and bingbot do, read your robots.txt one crawler at a time, look for the two settings that silently remove a site from AI answers, and check for the files assistants read. You see the result here and get the same scorecard by email. No account, no call, no pitch. If it comes back clean, we tell you that too.
What the check measures is whether the machines that answer people's questions can reach, read and use your site. It cannot tell you whether an assistant will then name your business, because nobody can promise that. Bing puts it in writing: SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations.
1 blocker found. Until this is fixed, at least one assistant cannot use this site no matter how good the content is.
- PassThe site answers a normal browserHTTP 200, 48,212 bytes, 412 ms.
- Passrobots.txt lets the AI crawlers inNone of the 11 published AI and search crawler names is blocked from the homepage.
- BlockerAI crawlers receive the same page a browser doesClaudeBot: HTTP 403 where a browser got 200. A firewall or bot rule is turning that crawler away even though robots.txt may allow it. No ranking tool shows this.
- PassNo setting silently removes the page from AI answersNo noindex, noarchive, nosnippet or nocache directive on the homepage, in the HTML or in the headers.
- CheckThe homepage is readable as plain text2 h1 headings (should be one); description is 212 characters.
- CheckThe files assistants read are in placesitemap.xml present; no llms.txt; no Markdown for agents. Markdown for agents is optional; a sitemap is not.
- PassStructured data tells machines what the business is1 JSON-LD block found.
What it replaces
- A rebuild every five years because nobody kept the old site current
- A site you cannot edit and a developer you cannot reach
- A DIY builder subscription that costs this much and does none of the work
- An SEO retainer that has never heard of llms.txt or IndexNow
Who it is for
Businesses whose customers ask questions before they buy: trades, shops, studios, clinics, restaurants, churches. On site across Hamilton, Stoney Creek, Ancaster, Dundas, Waterdown, Burlington, Oakville, Mississauga, Toronto, Brampton, Vaughan and Milton, down through Grimsby, Beamsville, St. Catharines, Niagara Falls and Welland, and out to Brantford, Cambridge and Kitchener. Remotely, anywhere in Ontario, because a website does not need us in the room. If you want a real web presence without becoming your own webmaster, this is built for you.
What week one looks like
- A 30-minute call: what you sell, who buys it, what has to be on the site, and what it should feel like.
- You approve a design direction, the plan and how you want to pay, in writing: the build in full, half now and half at launch, or $0 down.
- We build and launch: pages written from your real facts, hosting and domain sorted, every crawler check run and shown to you before it goes live.
- From then on you send changes when you have them and we handle everything else, with a quarterly SEO, GEO and AI visibility update on the plan.