Most Canadian business owners who are watching the trade war are thinking about steel, lumber, and auto parts. They’re not thinking about the subscription software running their business — the payment processor, the email platform, the cloud storage, the project management tool. But those are trade relationships too, and in most cases, the money flows south.

Honeycomb Creative has been working through this question; Allen and Conor have been doing the legwork to source more Canadian suppliers. Here is what the team has found: some switches are easy to make and worth it. Others are harder than they look. A few are not realistic yet.

Where switching to Canadian suppliers is straightforward

Payment processing. This is the clearest win. Helcim is a Canadian payment processor based in Calgary that handles credit card processing, point-of-sale, and online payments. Honeycomb Creative is moving Canadian clients from Stripe (San Francisco) to Helcim. The rates are competitive, the data stays in Canada, and the company is Canadian-owned. Moneris is another established Canadian option, particularly for businesses with physical retail locations.

Website hosting. Where your website lives matters more than most business owners realize. Canadian hosting means your data is subject to Canadian privacy law, not the U.S. Patriot Act or its successors, which can require companies to hand over data to U.S. government authorities without notifying the account holder. Honeycomb Creative hosts Canadian clients on Canadian servers.

When choosing a hosting provider, Honeycomb Creative also looks at physical infrastructure factors — earthquake zones, wildfire risk, and data centre resilience. These aren’t hypothetical concerns in BC. One of Honeycomb Creative’s clients, Coast Seismic, specializes in seismic mitigation for server infrastructure—a great for your in-house servers.

Domain registration. Canadian registrars exist and are easy to use. Honeycomb Creative uses NamesPro (namespro.ca), a Canadian registrar based in BC. If your domain is registered through a U.S. company, switching at renewal time costs nothing extra and keeps that relationship Canadian.

Where it gets harder

Cloud storage and media files. This is where honesty is required. Amazon Web Services is enormous; it is cheap, and for storing large media files — images, video, documents — it is genuinely difficult to match on price and performance. Canadian alternatives exist and are improving, but for businesses with significant storage needs, the economics are not yet comparable. Honeycomb Creative stores Canadian client assets on Canadian infrastructure where practical and uses U.S. services where the Canadian alternative isn’t yet there. Acknowledging this gap is more useful than pretending it doesn’t exist.

Start where switching is easy

Vass Bednar of the Canadian Shield Institute put it well in A CBC Front Burner episode from August 27, 2026: you don’t need to rebuild your digital infrastructure from the ground up. “A Corolla will do” for a lot of what Canadian businesses need. The goal is modest, meaningful changes that reduce dependency over time — not a complete overhaul that disrupts operations.

Start where switching is easy, and the Canadian alternative is genuinely good. Payments are the obvious first step. Hosting is the second. Beyond that, make the switch when you’re already changing tools for other reasons — when a contract comes up for renewal, when a platform raises its prices, when you’re starting fresh on a new project.

What this has to do with your website

Your website is often the first place where these decisions get made and where they’re hardest to undo. Where is it hosted? Who registered the domain? Where do the media files live? If you’re starting a new website project, these are the right questions to ask before anything is built.

Honeycomb Creative is a Canadian company — a small team in BC that has been building websites for Canadian businesses since 1996. Honeycomb Creative uses Canadian suppliers where available and works with American platforms when Canadian alternatives aren’t yet viable. That’s an honest answer, and it’s the only kind worth giving right now.

If you’d like to talk through what a more Canadian tech stack would look like for your business, it’s worth a conversation.