A website tells people about the company and brings in leads — the visitor mostly reads. A web app is a tool the user works in: they log into an account, create orders, see their own data, manage a process. The main sign you need an app rather than a website: your users get accounts, roles and their own data. The difference shows in the budget too: by InterLAB's references, a business website is 350,000–600,000 ₸ and 1–2 months, a turnkey web product is 5–15 million ₸ and 2–4 months.
Contents
The main difference: reading or working
The line between a website and an app is blurry in words but very clear in how they're built. The easiest test is a question: what does a person do on the page — take in information or get a task done?
Website
- Tells people about the company, services and prices
- The goal is a lead, a call or a message
- Content is the same for every visitor
- Search, speed and a clear structure matter
Web app
- The user logs into an account and works
- The goal is to complete a task inside the product
- Everyone has their own data, history and permissions
- Logic, roles and data reliability matter
If your users have a password, you're no longer building a website.
Five signs you need an app
If at least two items on this list are true of your project, you're designing a web app, even if you call it a website:
- Users need a personal account
- There are roles — customer, manager, administrator — and each sees their own view
- Data is created by users, not only by the site's editors
- You need calculations, statuses, an operations history
- You need exchange with 1C, a CRM or payments that goes deeper than a lead form
What this means for budget and timeline
Budget reference
- Business website
- 350,000–600,000 ₸
- Web app
- 5–15 million ₸ turnkey, MVP — 2–5 million ₸
Timeline
- Business website
- 1–2 months
- Web app
- 2–4 months, MVP — 6–12 weeks
Backend
- Business website
- forms and content management
- Web app
- business logic, roles, API
After launch
- Business website
- updates and content
- Web app
- feature growth per the roadmap
The price difference isn't contractor greed: an app has a whole layer a website doesn't — server-side logic, access permissions, storing and protecting user data, testing scenarios. More on website costs in "How Much Website Development Costs in Almaty".
The hybrid path: a website that grows into a product
A common situation: a product is in the plans, but not right now. The workable path then is to start with a website but build the architecture with headroom: a modern stack instead of a template CMS, a tidy data structure, analytics from day one.
How not to get the choice wrong
Describe to the contractor not the format ("we need a website") but the scenario: who comes, what they do, what they should end up with. From the scenario, an honest contractor will tell you whether it's a website, an app or a website with groundwork for an app — and explain why.
That's exactly what we do at an InterLAB brief: we unpack the scenarios and come back with an estimate after reviewing the task. If a website is enough for you, we'll say so — even if an app would be more profitable for us.
