V13 loses its security support on 14 December 2026, so it does have to move. But an upgrade done in a hurry - lost content, a payment integration still pointing at the old endpoint, editors locked out of a back office they no longer recognise - costs far more to unpick than the deadline ever saved.
We handle these upgrades end to end. Fixed price, no downtime, and you deal directly with the people doing the work rather than an account manager relaying messages to a team you never meet.
What actually goes wrong in a bad upgrade
Most upgrade horror stories have nothing to do with the version jump itself. They're about the things around it. A property editor that silently stops saving. A CRM feed that still writes to the old field names. A media library that migrates halfway and leaves broken links across the site. A back office your team opens on Monday and simply cannot use.
The upgrade "worked", in the narrow sense that the site now reports V17. But the business running on it is firefighting, and every fix after go-live is more expensive and more visible than it would have been before. On a legal or professional-services site, that isn't an inconvenience. It's client work interrupted and, depending on what broke, a compliance question you now have to answer.
Getting onto a supported version is the easy half. Getting there without breaking the things your business actually relies on is the half worth paying for.
How we keep an upgrade boring
Boring is the goal. A good upgrade is one nobody outside the project notices, because the live site never wobbled and the team's Monday looked like every other Monday.
We build and test V17 against a copy of your live environment, work through the breaking changes and package updates there, and only cut over once everything has been verified. Your current site stays up throughout. Nothing experimental touches production.
You deal with us directly for the whole thing. No account manager, no rotating pool of contractors, no offshore handoff where context gets lost between time zones. We've worked on every version of Umbraco since v4 and spent decades on the wider Microsoft stack, which mostly means we've already met the thing that's about to go wrong with your particular site.
What we look at before we give you a price
The honest answer to "how much is an upgrade" is "it depends", and anyone who quotes you a flat number before looking is guessing. What it depends on is short and specific, so the free call is mostly us checking four things:
- Custom back-office work. Bespoke property editors, dashboards or content apps are where V17 can need real rebuilding rather than a straight migration.
- Third-party integrations. A CRM, payment gateway or data feed may need reworking or remapping against the new APIs.
- Hosting access. The no-downtime, parallel cutover assumes we can control the target environment. If hosting is locked down or managed by a third party, we plan around that.
- Content and media volume. Most sites are fine; the outliers are worth knowing about up front.
If your site is standard, you get the fixed price below. If it isn't, we tell you exactly why and what the number is before you commit, not after.
Two routes to V17, and we pick the right one
Umbraco itself describes two sensible ways to move from V13 to V17. Most standard sites take the first, and that's what the fixed price covers.
Route 1: upgrade in place. We upgrade your existing solution and run the migrations against it. The right call for healthy, well-understood sites, and the one behind the fixed price.
Route 2: a fresh V17 build. We stand up a clean V17 solution and move your content and structure across in a controlled way with Umbraco Deploy. Better for legacy-heavy sites carrying real technical debt, and scoped separately. If yours is one of those, we say so on the call rather than forcing it into a price that doesn't fit.
One thing worth knowing about this particular jump: Umbraco rebuilt the back office in V14, with a new architecture and extension model. Standard content and templates migrate cleanly, but any bespoke property editors, dashboards or back-office extensions have to be rebuilt for the new model. That's the single biggest thing we check before quoting.
The version you're moving to, not just off
V13's security support ends on 14 December 2026. Its .NET 8 runtime reaches end of life a month earlier. After those dates, anything found in the CMS or the framework it sits on stays unpatched on your live site.
V17 is a long-term support release on .NET 10, supported into 2028, with a modern block-based editing experience. Moving now, calmly, on a fixed price, is a straightforward decision. Moving in a panic next autumn, competing for scarce developer time, is not.
The full offer, the honest FAQ and the booking link are below.
