The difference matters because the cost difference is enormous. A website presents information. A web app does work: it holds data, has accounts, enforces rules and changes state. One might be five thousand pounds and the other fifty.
Plenty of businesses commission an app when a well-structured website would have done, and plenty struggle on with spreadsheets when the work genuinely needed a system. This guide is how to tell which side you are on.
- 1
Write down the job in one sentence
Not the solution — the job. "People need to find us and get in touch." "Members need to see their own booking history." "Staff need to stop re-entering the same order into three systems." The verb in that sentence usually settles it: find, read and understand point to a website; track, manage, book and calculate point to an app.
- 2
Ask whether anyone needs to log in
This is the cleanest single test. If different people must see different things, or anything is private to one person, you need accounts — and accounts mean an application. If everyone sees the same content, it is a website, however sophisticated it looks.
- 3
Ask whether the data outlives the visit
A contact form sends a message and forgets it. An app remembers: your bookings, your order history, your progress. If the system needs to know what happened last time someone visited, and act on it, that is application territory.
- 4
Count how many people are doing manual work
Add up the hours spent each week copying between spreadsheets, re-keying orders, chasing status by email. Multiply by a year. That figure is the honest budget for a system, and it is also the honest test — if it is small, the manual process is cheaper than replacing it, and that is a legitimate answer.
- 5
Check whether something off the shelf already does it
Booking, invoicing, CRM, email marketing, basic e-commerce — these are solved problems with mature products at a few pounds a month. Custom is worth it when your process is genuinely unusual or is itself the competitive advantage. Building a worse version of an existing product is the most common expensive mistake here.
- 6
Consider the middle ground
Most businesses need a good website plus one or two connected tools, not a bespoke platform. A website with a members area, or one wired into an existing booking system, covers a great many cases at a fraction of the cost. The choice is rarely as binary as it first appears.
- 7
Be honest about running it afterwards
An application is never finished. It needs hosting, updates, security patches, support when someone cannot log in, and changes as the business changes. Budget fifteen to twenty per cent of the build cost annually. If that is not affordable, an app is not affordable, and it is far better to establish that now.
A rough guide to cost
A well-built small business website typically runs from a few thousand pounds. A custom application with accounts, data and business rules starts in the tens of thousands and rises with complexity. The gap is not margin — it is the difference between arranging content and building software that has to be correct, secure and maintained.
Start smaller than you think
If the answer is an application, resist specifying everything at once. Build the part that solves the most painful problem, use it properly for a few months, then extend. Requirements written before anyone has used anything are always partly wrong, and the expensive version of finding that out is discovering it at the end.
Frequently asked questions
Yes, if it is built with that in mind. Retrofitting accounts and data onto a site built purely for content is usually harder than expected, so it is worth saying at brief stage that it may come later, even if it is not in scope now.
Would rather we did it?
These guides are here so you can do it yourself. If you would rather hand it over, that is what we do.
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