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 a domain renewing at C$33 (US$23) that should cost about C$14 (US$10), a US$17+/month website builder hosting five pages that change twice a year, and a "professional email" add-on marked up threefold. None of it is a scam, exactly. All of it is overpay, engineered by teaser pricing and the reasonable assumption that the biggest brand is the safe choice.

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. Total infrastructure cost: about CA$15 a year. 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

Some outbound recommendations are affiliate links — when you buy through them, the provider pays us a commission, at no extra cost to you. Three commitments keep that honest:

• 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 scout@digitalsetupscout.com.