Umbraco 13 → 17 / End of life 14 December 2026
The difference is knowable in a week - and it is not a negotiation.
What your upgrade costs comes down to four specific things in your codebase. We look at all four, at no charge, and give you a fixed number before you commit to anything.
Three upgrade slots before December. Next availability January.
01 / Your options
Including the ones we do not get paid for. If extended support is the right answer for you this year, we will say so.
| Upgrade in place | Rebuild on 17 | Buy XLTS | Stay on 13 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Your existing solution moved forward to Umbraco 17 on .NET 10 | A clean Umbraco 17 build, with content and structure migrated into it | Extended support from Umbraco HQ: 6, 12 or 24 months of continued CMS patches | No action |
| Right when | Your codebase is healthy and you want to keep what works | You carry technical debt you would rather not pay to move forward, or a redesign is due anyway | You cannot move before December for reasons that are not technical - budget year, a project in flight, a content freeze | Never, for a public-facing site processing user data |
| Roughly | €5,000 - €20,000 | €18,000 upward | Umbraco's list price, plus our coordination | - |
| Catch | You inherit your existing structure, debt and all | Longer, and content migration needs real planning | Covers Umbraco, not the .NET 8 runtime underneath. Buys time, does not remove the work | Unpatched vulnerabilities accumulate indefinitely, with no upper bound on exposure |
XLTS bought deliberately is a bridge. An upgrade rushed against a deadline you did not choose is a gamble.
02 / What drives the number
If you have asked three agencies for a price and received three unrelated numbers, that is not evasion. It reflects something real about this particular version jump.
Moving the version number is trivial - change the target framework, update the packages, run the migrations. On a clean site that is a day's work. Almost everything you are paying for is finding and rebuilding what Umbraco changed underneath you between 13 and 17.
BIGGEST COST DRIVER
Umbraco rebuilt the backoffice in version 14 on a new architecture and extension model. Bespoke property editors, dashboards and content apps written for the old AngularJS model do not carry forward - they are rebuilt as Web Components. A site with none of this is straightforward. A site with eight custom editors is a different project entirely, and no amount of tooling changes that.
Every third-party package in your solution either published a version targeting Umbraco 17 or it did not. The ones that did not need a replacement, and a replacement means reworking whatever depended on it. This is cheap to check and expensive to discover late.
The move from .NET 8 to .NET 10, combined with changes to Umbraco's own APIs, can mean rework wherever your site talks to something else - CRM, ERP, payment, identity, data feeds. Authentication in particular changed, so SSO setups get rebuilt and re-verified rather than carried across.
Umbraco 17 ships Tiptap as its rich text editor in place of TinyMCE, and it is stricter about what it will accept. Legacy Macros are rebuilt as Block List or Block Grid components so your front end keeps rendering. Separately, Umbraco Forms has moved to annual licensing - if you use it, that is a commercial decision to make during the upgrade, not after it.
All four are inspectable. None of them require guesswork. They just require someone to actually look before quoting.
03 / Step one
We do not quote from a conversation. We quote from your code.
The database backup is what lets us commit to a fixed price rather than a range - without it we are inferring your content model instead of reading it. NDA first if your procurement requires one. Access is revoked the day the scan ends.
A written findings document, typically within five working days. It lists:
The findings document is yours. If you take it to another agency and get the work done cheaper, that is a legitimate outcome - and we would rather that than sell you a fixed price neither of us is happy with.
We charge nothing for the scan because it is also how we decide whether we want the project.
It tells you what a sales call cannot: whether you are an €5,000 site or a €25,000 site.
Book an upgrade scan04 / Pricing
The free scan establishes which route you are on.
For B and C, detailed planning is the first paid milestone of the project rather than something you buy separately.
Route A
€5,000
Fixed price / 3 working weeks
Your site: well-maintained, running largely standard Umbraco.
Payment: 50% to start, 50% on handover
After launch: 14 days of cover
Route B
from €12,000
Fixed after the scan / 5-7 weeks
Your site: real customisation - bespoke backoffice work and integrations that matter.
Payment: start / ready for testing / handover
After launch: 14 days of cover
Route C
from €18,000
Fixed per phase / 9-13 weeks
Your site: heavily customised, enterprise, multisite - or ready for a clean start.
Payment: per phase
After launch: 14 days of cover
Umbraco Cloud sites qualify for the fixed price. We work across Cloud and self-hosted.
Two commitments on Route A. If the scan was accurate and the work turns out larger than we judged, that is our problem and the price holds. If the scan shows you do not fit Route A, you hear it then - before you commit.
05 / How we run it
Everything we build is built alongside it. Route A, three working weeks:
Week 1
We stand up a parallel environment with a copy of your live data. We work through the findings from the scan and confirm each one against a running build rather than against documentation.
Week 2
Backoffice extensions, packages, integrations. Every SSO flow and API endpoint is exercised, not assumed. We test against a plan built from how your site is actually used. That plan is a deliverable, and it outlives the project as your regression suite.
Week 3
Your team works in the new backoffice before go-live, so anything that feels wrong is caught while it is still cheap to change. Cutover is one short scheduled window with a tested rollback. If verification is not complete, we do not switch.
The date moves; the standard does not.
On URLs: an in-place upgrade does not change your URL structure, so there is no SEO exposure to manage. A rebuild does move structure - there we build explicit 1:1 301 mappings and verify them with a full crawl against staging before anything goes live.
06 / What you keep
Every upgrade we run produces documentation of how your system actually fits together: what each piece of custom code does, where integrations attach, what assumptions the content model makes. This exists because we needed it to do the work safely. You keep it.
It matters more than it used to. Development teams increasingly work through AI coding assistants, and those tools are only as useful as the context available to them. An undocumented codebase makes every future change slower and riskier, whoever or whatever is making it. A documented one does the opposite.
That is not an upsell - it is a by-product of doing the upgrade properly, and it belongs to you either way. Where we find things worth cleaning up along the way, we tell you what they are and what they would cost. Whether any of it goes into scope is your call.
07 / Who you are working with
Our most recent Umbraco 13 → 17 upgrade ran to 40 hours end to end, on a site with 3 custom extensions and 2 simple integrations. Roughly three quarters of that time went into identifying what would break.
The upgrade itself was the short part - which is exactly why we will not quote one without looking first.
A Certified Umbraco Professional. He is on the scan call, and he is the person writing the code. There is no layer between you and him, and nothing is passed onward to anyone else.
ADHDEV has built and maintained Umbraco and .NET systems for UK, EU and US clients for ten years. We work from Poland, one hour ahead of the UK - a full overlapping working day rather than a narrow afternoon window.
We deliberately run a small number of upgrades in parallel so each one gets proper attention. After those three, the next availability is January.
08 / If you cannot make December
Budget cycles, a redesign already in flight, a content freeze that cannot shift. Some organisations genuinely cannot move by 14 December.
Umbraco sells Extended Long-Term Support for version 13 in 6, 12 and 24-month blocks. We can coordinate it for you. Two things to be clear about:
We would rather help you plan a proper upgrade with XLTS in place than rush a bad one to beat a date.
09 / Questions
It is the price for Route A, and Route A has a published scope - you can read exactly what it covers above. What makes it possible is that we are small, we do not carry agency overhead, and we do not quote blind. The scan is what protects the number for both of us. And if the scan shows your site needs less than Route A covers, the price comes down accordingly.
On Route A, the fixed price holds. That is what the scan buys us: enough information that surprises are rare, and enough margin that the occasional one is ours to absorb. On B and C, scope changes are handled at the planning milestone, before the build starts.
No planned downtime. We build and verify in a parallel environment and cut over in a single short, scheduled window, with a tested rollback ready. This assumes we can control the target hosting - if it is locked down or third-party managed, we cover that on the scan call and plan the cutover accordingly.
The version 17 backoffice was rebuilt from the ground up, so it looks different. It is also faster and holds up better with several people working at once. Most editors are comfortable within a day, and your team gets hands-on access during week three rather than meeting the new interface on launch day.
Yes, and it is worth knowing early: Umbraco Forms moved from a one-off licence to annual licensing. During the upgrade you decide whether to license it going forward or replace it. If you are on Umbraco Cloud this matters less, since Forms is included there. Either way we put it in front of you during the scan, not on an invoice.
On an in-place upgrade your URL structure does not change, so there is nothing to lose. On a rebuild, where structure does move, we build 1:1 301 redirect maps and verify them with a full crawl on staging before go-live - no redirect chains, no soft 404s.
You do - code, documentation, test plan, redirect maps, all of it. No proprietary layer, no dependency on us afterwards. If you want ongoing maintenance we are happy to talk about it, but the upgrade does not create a lock-in that makes that conversation one-sided.
Yes, for the repetitive parts: translating old AngularJS logic into TypeScript, working through boilerplate refactoring, building out test scaffolding. It compresses the tedious hours, and that is part of why this price works. It does not make the judgement calls, and every change ships through a developer who is accountable for it.
Because it costs less than London, not because it is worth less. One hour of time difference, English-speaking, ten years of UK and EU delivery, and direct contact with the developer rather than a managed relationship. If your concern is context getting lost in a handoff - that is a real risk with large offshore teams, and the reason we do not work that way.
Then you get a number for Route B or C, with an explanation of exactly which findings drove it. You are under no obligation at that point. Plenty of people take a scan, take the findings and go elsewhere - we would rather that than a fixed price we both regret.
A conversation, a look at your code, a written findings document and a fixed number. Free, and yours to keep regardless of what you do next.
Three slots before 14 December.
Next availability January.