Website vs web app vs mobile app: which does your business need?

A website tells people about your business and gets them to contact you. A web app is software your team or your customers sign in to and use to get work done. A mobile app is software installed from the App Store or Google Play that can use the phone's camera, location, notifications and offline storage. For most Australian small businesses the order is the same: a website first ($4,000 to $8,000 ex GST), a web app when spreadsheets and email can no longer keep up ($15,000 to $40,000), and a mobile app only when the phone itself is part of the job ($20,000 to $50,000).

The three overlap more than the names suggest. A website can have a booking form, a web app can have public pages, and a web app can be installed on a phone. The useful question is not which technology but what job it has to do.

A website is enough when your business sells a service or a product that people research online, and the job of the site is to make them confident enough to call, book or buy. A trades business, a clinic, a consultancy and a café all fit here. The website carries your services, prices, proof and a way to get in touch, and it is built to be found in Google.

Our business website package costs $4,000 to $8,000 ex GST and takes 3 to 6 weeks. It includes five to eight pages, a content management system, mobile-first design, search engine setup, contact and booking forms with spam protection, analytics and hosting setup.

Signs you need more than a website: you are copying information from the website's forms into a spreadsheet, customers ring to ask for the status of something, or staff need to see different information from the public.

You need a web app when the business runs on a process, and the process runs on spreadsheets, email and five tools that do not talk to each other. The app replaces that with one system built around how you actually work: jobs, orders, approvals, documents and messages in one place, with each person seeing what their role allows.

Common examples:

• a job scheduling and invoicing system for a trades or cleaning business
• a client portal where customers see progress, files, messages and invoices
• an approval workflow for quotes, leave, purchase orders or compliance documents
• a first version of a software product that founders want to put in front of real users (an MVP)

Our web app package costs $15,000 to $40,000 ex GST and takes 6 to 12 weeks. It includes a discovery workshop, wireframes, sign-in with email, Google and passkeys, a database, one core workflow, an admin panel, email notifications and deployment with continuous integration. Integrations with Xero, Stripe, HubSpot or Google Workspace are $1,500 to $5,000 each. How much does it cost to make an app goes through what moves the price.

A web app also runs on a phone. It opens in the browser, and when it is built as a progressive web app (PWA) it can be added to the home screen and opened like any other app. Reckonly, a receipts-to-accounting product our co-founder Anis built before ELORA DIGITAL, works this way: sole traders photograph receipts on their phone, and the app runs in the browser or installed, with no app store in between. You can read how it was built in the Reckonly case study.

A mobile app earns its extra cost when the phone itself is part of the job:

• Hardware. The camera, barcode scanning, GPS tracking, Bluetooth devices or sensors.
• Offline use. Field staff who work in basements, on building sites or in regional areas with poor reception.
• Notifications that must arrive. Reminders, alerts and dispatch messages that people act on immediately.
• Being in the app stores. Some customers expect to find you there.
• Heavy daily use. A tool someone opens twenty times a day should feel native.

Our mobile app package uses React Native, so one codebase ships to both iOS and Android. It costs $20,000 to $50,000 ex GST, takes 10 to 16 weeks, and includes the API behind the app, push notifications and the app store submission. The higher price and longer timeline come from building for two platforms, the store review process and testing on real devices.

If none of the five reasons above applies, a web app does the same job for less, sooner, and with no app store between you and an update.

A progressive web app (PWA) is a web app with two extras: it can be added to a phone's home screen, where it opens full screen with its own icon like any installed app, and it keeps working, at least partly, when the connection drops, because the browser stores the parts it has already loaded. There is no app store between you and your users: an update is live the moment it is published, on every phone, and nobody has to download anything. Reckonly works this way, and so does most business software we build.

A native app, in our case one React Native codebase shipped to both iOS and Android, is installed from the App Store and Google Play and has the phone's full set of features available to it.

How to choose:

The honest default for a business tool is the PWA. Build the web app, have people install it from the browser, and move to a native app only when a row in the right-hand column turns out to matter to the people using it every day. Because the native app would share the same API and database, nothing is wasted by starting with the web.

Yes, and most growing businesses do. The usual shape is a website that brings customers in, a web app behind a sign-in where the work happens, and later a mobile app for the people who need it on the road. Because the web app and the mobile app share the same API and database, the mobile app is an addition rather than a rebuild.

Build in that order: the website gives you a place to send people, the web app proves the process with real users, and the mobile app then has something solid to connect to.

Imagine a Melbourne physiotherapy clinic with three practitioners.

The clinic's first need is patients finding it and booking: a business website with an online booking form, in the $4,000 to $8,000 range, delivered in 3 to 6 weeks. Six months later the front desk is spending an hour a day emailing exercise plans and chasing consent forms. That is a process, so the next step is a patient portal: a web app where patients sign in, see their exercise plan, complete forms and view invoices, in the $15,000 to $40,000 range over 6 to 12 weeks. A mobile app would only make sense if the clinic wanted patients to record exercise videos with the phone camera or receive reminders as push notifications, and even then the portal could be installed as a PWA first.

1. Does anyone need to sign in? No: a website. Yes: keep going.
2. Is there a process (booking, approving, tracking, invoicing) that lives in spreadsheets or email today? Yes: a web app.
3. Does the process need the camera, GPS, offline use or push notifications? Yes: a mobile app, or a web app first and a mobile app once the process is proven.
4. How many people will use it every day? A dozen occasional users rarely justify a native app.
5. How much will change in the first six months? A web app updates instantly; an app store release takes longer. Early-stage products change often.

If you are still unsure, tell us about your project in your own words. You will get an estimate range within one business day, and we will say plainly which of the three you need, including when the answer is the cheapest one.