Plan for 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year for maintenance, covering operating system and library updates, security patches, bug fixes, monitoring and small adjustments. An app that cost $80,000 (€70,000, £60,000) to build needs roughly $12,000 to $16,000 (€10,000 to €14,000, £9,000 to £12,000) a year to keep healthy, plus hosting and third-party service fees. Improvements and new features are separate. Skipping maintenance does not save money. It defers it with interest, and eventually breaks the app.
Prices are in US dollars. Euro and pound figures in parentheses are approximate, rounded conversions. Quotes are issued in the currency of your contract.
Software is not finished when it launches. The operating systems it runs on change every year, the libraries it depends on release security fixes monthly, the app stores change their rules, and users find bugs. Maintenance is the work of keeping the product running as the world moves. This post explains what it covers, what it costs at each stage, and how to keep the cost sensible.
What does maintenance cover?
- Platform updates. New iOS and Android versions every year, with changes that can break existing apps. Browsers update constantly.
- Dependency updates. The libraries and frameworks the app is built on release fixes, including security fixes, continuously. Falling behind makes eventual upgrades painful and leaves known vulnerabilities open.
- Security patches. Responding to newly discovered vulnerabilities in anything the app uses.
- Bug fixes. Problems users find that were not caught before launch.
- Monitoring and response. Someone watching uptime, errors and performance, and acting when something breaks at two in the morning.
- Store compliance. Meeting new app store requirements, which arrive several times a year and can block updates if ignored.
- Small adjustments. Copy changes, a new field, a tweak to a flow. The line between maintenance and improvement is drawn in the contract.
Not maintenance: new features, redesigns, new platforms, integrations. Those are development and are budgeted separately, as described in when to build version two.
What does it cost?
| Stage | Typical annual maintenance | Plus hosting and services | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple app, few users | $3,000 to $8,000 (€2,500 to €7,000, £2,000 to £6,000) | $500 to $2,000 (€435 to €1,500, £370 to £1,500) | Quarterly updates, on-call for emergencies |
| Mid-complexity app, thousands of users | $10,000 to $25,000 (€8,500 to €22,000, £7,500 to £18,000) | $2,000 to $12,000 (€1,500 to €10,000, £1,500 to £9,000) | Monthly updates, monitoring, defined response times |
| Complex platform, integrations, regulated data | $25,000 to $80,000 (€22,000 to €70,000, £18,000 to £60,000) | $12,000 to $60,000 (€10,000 to €50,000, £9,000 to £44,000) | Continuous updates, security reviews, compliance work, faster response |
The rule of thumb of 15 to 20 percent of build cost per year holds for most products. It breaks upward for products with many integrations, since every integration partner changes things, for regulated products with compliance obligations, and for products with heavy usage where performance work is ongoing. It breaks downward for simple web apps with few dependencies.
What happens if you skip it?
Nothing, for a while. Then an operating system update breaks a screen. A library vulnerability is published and your app is exposed. The app store rejects your next update because a requirement changed eighteen months ago. The dependency upgrade that would have taken a day each quarter now takes a month, because everything moved at once. Deferred maintenance is technical debt with the highest interest rate, and the bill arrives at the worst moment, usually when you need to ship something else. See what technical debt is.
How is maintenance usually contracted?
- Retainer. A fixed monthly fee for a defined amount of team time, covering maintenance and small improvements, with response times. Predictable, and the most common arrangement after launch.
- Support contract plus hourly. A smaller fee for monitoring and response, with updates and fixes billed by the hour. Cheaper in quiet months, less predictable.
- In-house. Once you have engineers, maintenance is part of their job. Budget it as a share of their time rather than assuming it is free.
How to keep the cost down without decay
- Build on mainstream technology. Well-supported frameworks have fewer breaking changes and more people who can handle them. See what a tech stack is.
- Update little and often. Small monthly updates cost less than one large annual one, and they surface problems while they are small.
- Automate testing. Automated tests make updates safe to apply, which makes them cheap. Their absence makes every update a risk, which makes teams avoid them.
- Keep dependencies few. Every library is a future update. Teams that add them freely pay for it later.
- Use managed services. A managed database, managed email, managed payments: the provider does the maintenance for that piece.
- Monitor properly. Finding a problem from an alert costs less than finding it from a review.
Budgeting for the first year
Add together: the maintenance retainer, hosting and third-party services, app store developer fees, and a separate budget for the improvements users will ask for. For a mid-complexity app that cost $80,000 (€70,000, £60,000) to build, a realistic first year is $12,000 to $16,000 (€10,000 to €14,000, £9,000 to £12,000) for maintenance, $3,000 to $10,000 (€2,500 to €8,500, £2,000 to £7,500) for hosting and services, and whatever you can allocate to the second and third releases. Founders who budget only the build discover this list in month two. Our post on what an app costs includes it in the hidden costs.
How 7L handles maintenance
After the support period that follows every launch, most founders move to a monthly retainer that covers maintenance, monitoring with defined response times, and a share of improvement work, decided at a weekly review. We build on mainstream technology with automated tests, which keeps updates routine, and we keep the technical debt list visible so that maintenance is planned rather than reactive. Ask us for a maintenance estimate for your product.
Frequently asked questions
Is maintenance included in the build price?
Usually a short support period is, typically a few weeks to a few months after launch. Ongoing maintenance is a separate arrangement. Ask before signing so the first year's cost is known.
Can I pause maintenance when money is tight?
For a short period, with the understanding that updates are accumulating. Keep monitoring and security response even when pausing everything else, because those are the items whose absence causes real damage.
Why do I need to update if nothing is broken?
Because the platforms and libraries the app depends on are changing whether you update or not. Staying current in small steps is cheap. Catching up after two years is expensive, and in the meantime known vulnerabilities stay open.
Does a no-code product need maintenance?
Less, because the platform maintains itself, which is one of no-code's real advantages. You still need someone to handle changes to the tool, integrations that break and the subscription costs, which rise with usage.
How do I know if I am being overcharged for maintenance?
Ask for a monthly summary of what was done: updates applied, issues fixed, monitoring events handled. Compare the retainer against the 15 to 20 percent rule of thumb. A retainer far above it should come with an explanation, such as integrations or compliance work.