So we are currently working on setting up a website for our business which for regulatory reasons is based exclusively inside of Canada.

The issue I am running into is that the .com domain is owned by a domain reseller and they are asking for >20k for it. At this point in time that is a fairly large expense and I am trying to find a way to assign value to the .com vs .ca debate.

How big of a hit is it really to have a .ca versus a .com suffix as a Canadian company? I am having a hard time trying to find good sources of information on this type of topic before hiring a consultant. Most of my competitors are using a .ca so I don’t believe it will be detrimental, but if the .com is a tangible benefit would it be worth changing the name?

I have a couple options, I have the .ca domain of the same name already and I have the .com domain with an “s” at the end of the name which doesn’t change a whole lot about the business name. For context it basically changes the name from apple to apples. It still makes sense and sounds alright.
Is it worth it to rebrand slightly to the plural version of the business name to take a .com suffix?

Any help/resources would be appreciated.