A field guide born from watching people get overcharged

Digital Setup Scout exists because of a pattern: a small business owner proudly gets online, and a look at their bills shows an expensive domain renewal, a monthly website builder hosting five pages that change twice a year, and a marked-up “professional email” add-on. The calculator uses current verified data to show the gap. Some subscriptions pay for useful editing tools or support; others no longer match what the business needs. We help owners tell the difference.

The advice here is Canadian-made — most guides in this space quietly assume you're American, and things like .ca domains, CIRA, Interac, and CAD pricing deserve first-class treatment. Everything works for US businesses too; the CA/US switch in the header flips prices and country-specific notes.

The test we apply to ourselves

This site runs on the exact stack we recommend to you: a cheaply-registered domain and free Cloudflare Pages hosting, built as a static site. The only recurring infrastructure purchase is the domain. If the cheap route were flaky, slow, or amateurish, you'd be experiencing that right now instead of reading this sentence on a fast page.

How the site makes money

There are no active paid affiliate relationships and these links currently earn no commission. We may apply to programs after incorporation. Three commitments guide that future model:

• The recommendation comes first. Our top hosting pick, Cloudflare, pays us nothing — it has no affiliate program. It's the pick anyway.
• Renewal prices lead every comparison, because that's what you'll actually pay — even where the teaser price would make an affiliate partner look better.
• Every affiliate page says so up top, and the full policy is public.

About the prices you see

Every price on this site carries a "last verified" date and comes from the provider's own pricing pages. Currency conversions (marked with ≈) use a recent exchange rate and are approximations — USD-billed providers charge your card in USD. If you catch a stale price, we genuinely want to know.

Who's behind this

Digital Setup Scout is written and maintained by Andrew Austin, who runs Seaway Digital, a Canadian web and hosting business. The site started the way most useful things do: from watching the same overpay pattern repeat across small-business clients — a domain, a builder subscription, an email add-on, each one a little more than it needed to be — and deciding the fix was to just publish the real prices where anyone could check them.

Get in touch

Spotted an error, have a question your situation doesn't fit, or just saved a pile of money and want to say so? Email andrew@digitalsetupscout.com.