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How much does a “Lift & Shift” cost

How to take your existing website pages and rebuild them on top of the Homeflow platform

Great – you’re interested in exploring a “Lift & Shift” process with Homeflow. That’s to say, you’d like to take your your existing website pages and rebuild them on top of the Homeflow platform, fixing a string of technical issues in the process, and maybe adding some new features and tweaks at the same time.

And so now you need to know what that would cost?

It’s hard to give an accurate quote before we’ve met with you and gone through the detail, as it totally depends on the answers to a series of questions, but we can certainly give you some guideline ranges. If you’d like to explore further, we’ll come and sit down with you, and go through a string of questions / suggestions / options for the rebuild, which we can then take away and price accurately for you.

Broadly speaking there are two components to the charge:

  • The “build” fee (or “migration”, really), which is payable upfront
  • The ongoing monthly licence for the Homeflow product and service

Broadly speaking, we do lift and shift projects anywhere in the range from £8k to about £12k, and, for the really big ones with dozens of fixes and new features, on up into the 10s of thousands of pounds. We’ve have managed to do it for less than this, where no changes were required, and no developments at all needed to our core engine to support the site, but that has only been in cases with a reasonably sized monthly licence to follow (which means multi branch agencies really), making the investment worthwhile for us.

That is a big range, so let’s look at what drives the variation within it.  It really boils down to these factors:

  • We do a detailed pass and identify any areas that your current site supports, which we don’t support.  We then need to talk to you about these areas and understand if they are vital.  You might be willing to swap them out in return for other features, functionality or products, which helps keep costs down. Or there may be work-arounds.  We will discuss all of this with you as we work out an accurate figure.
  • You may also have new development ideas you are wanting to work in, during the lift and shift.  We come and talk to you about what specification you have for those projects, and if necessary, will help you work up a clear specification.  We’ll need a clear specification document, and a few days for our development team to price the projects, once that specification is settled.
  • We often make a video of your site, identifying usability or navigation issues, and making fix suggestions.  We need to go through this with you and see if you want us making any of those changes, lots of them, or all of them.  That then determines how much change work is involved.
  • We will also suggest whole new areas of functionality we can add in, whilst we are at it.  You might be interested in some of those: some are essentially near free, others are more expensive to bolt in.
  • If you need us converting the site from a static desktop site, to a fully responsive site, we will need to understand what grade of responsive site you want (how many break points for different device sizes, etc.).  A simple responsive conversion can often be done at the lower end of a budget range, or along with a reasonable basket of developments, at the mid-level budgets listed above.

We can typically get to an accurate price for you within a week of meeting up.

The monthly licence component is much more standard.  We have a selection of options: the most popular option is our Professional package, at £150/office/month, and we have an Enterprise package at £275/branch/month.  There are some scale discounts which start for agencies with five offices, then ten offices, and above.

If you’d like to learn more, we have some videos which explore both the upfront pricing, what is included in the monthly licence, and indeed how this all fits together with your online marketing spend generally. Those videos are only a couple of minutes long each, and they are focused on new builds, rather than lift and shifts.  Lift and shifts are typically less expensive than full rebuilds, unless you are making lots of changes, adding functionality, going fully responsive to a high grade, etc.  If you go at the complex end of things on all dimensions, then there comes a point where it is more economical to rebuild entirely (even if that follows a relatively similar design style; you obviously like the design, given we’re discussing a lift and shift in the first place).

It’s also possible for us to rebalance for you between monthly fees and the upfront build.  If you are more sensitive to the upfront fee than the licence, we can typically accommodate that.  Or vice versa, if it is easier for you to fund the capex upfront, but you want to minimise the ongoing charge, then we can explore options to rebalance in that direction too. Basically, it’s a conversation. We very rarely fail to reach agreement on price once clients understand the full value in what they are buying; it becomes a relatively comfortable conversation about budget, phasing perhaps, and balancing the fees.  We’re willing to work with you to accommodate most budgets if we possibly can.

We hope that helps give some sense of the range of costs, and what influences it.  If you are interested to get a more accurate picture, let’s get a meeting in the diary.  We will be able to move quickly to an accurate number, once we have discussed the above points with you in detail.

Thanks for reading.

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