How Much Does It Cost to Maintain an App in 2024?

Although the excitement of finally getting your solution off the ground and seeing it live can be overpowering, don't let it catch you off guard like it did many others. You didn't forget that there's still lots of work ahead on the developers' side of the court, right?

Actually, there's probably a lot more of it than you think, as it's not just the stuff you left gathering dust in the backlog or the new feature plans you have lined out in your product development roadmap. We're talking about the actions that need to be taken to keep what you've already released up and running.

Making sure that the application runs smoothly means conducting regular health checks and monitoring the solution just as you would with your new car. Is there a check engine light on signaling a malfunction or that you need an oil change? Does it need some extra fluids or a new exterior bulb? You'd take care of this kind of stuff without delay for safety reasons and to avoid costlier fixes down the line, right? It's just the same with applications.

Yet, the actual price of how much to maintain an app is individual. And since it's an ongoing task and by all means not a one-time hassle, the expenses for such work should be factored in when planning your business or startup budget. How much does app maintenance cost in reality? On this page, we share realistic estimates and go over the main things influencing the costs.

What Do App Maintenance Services Usually Cover?

Let's start off by dotting the i's regarding what web or mobile application maintenance is not. As a rule, maintenance and support usually do not imply developing new features. Although the built product will likely be modified more than once after its release, adding and rolling out completely new functionality doesn't count as maintenance. The introduction of new features falls under the category of "additional milestones" and consequent product development.

As we said, post-release maintenance is continuous work dealing with keeping the product running. It generally covers the following:

• bug fixes (troubleshooting, spotting and eliminating glitches, errors, or technical issues that can come up after release, these could deal with UX/UI, performance, and so on);
• compatibility updates (if an app is based on an operating system like iOS or Android, whenever there are new OS updates, the app has to be fine-tuned to be compatible and operate effectively);
• security patches (addressing system safety precaution matters timely along with other security reinforcement work to protect the product and data from hacks or other threats);
• performance optimization (work dealing with shortening load time, speeding up how the app runs and its effectiveness, navigation and user experience improvements, and code optimization);
• infrastructure maintenance (keeping the servers, hosting, databases, and overall infrastructure up and stable is handled as well);
• feature improvement (enhancing existing functionality can sometimes be considered mobile application maintenance and support);
• simple integrations (at times, linking up extra third-party applications could also be attributed to maintenance).

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Importance of Timely Mobile Application Maintenance

We get it, since app support costs are generally quite high, many neglect the matter hoping that nothing happens. But regular maintenance is non-negotiable if you want your solution to function properly. Not to mention that you'll probably be receiving feedback from your early adopters and users who'll report issues and give you additional hints at what isn't functioning properly or can be improved.

‍Why does app maintenance matter? And why do you need to spend resources on it? Let's go over the main benefits and risks of pushing aside maintenance tasks.

Major Risks of Ignoring App Maintenance

Here are several reasons why you should prioritize maintenance work and not let bugs and various errors go unnoticed.

1. You Can Get Removed from the Markets

As we've mentioned, applications are generally built to run on operating systems such as Android or iOS. So if there are some new OS release changes or new devices emerging, you'll need to make corresponding tweaks to your app.

But that's not all. Having the app featured in the app marketplaces also implies playing by the rules and sticking to the guidelines of Google Play, App Store, or others. Their review requirements assess app quality and regard performance, code, bug absence, timely maintenance, privacy policies, among other things. If you don't meet the guidelines, your app might fail the review and get temporarily removed from the markets.

Plus, version release history and the date of your last update also affect how your app is perceived both by potential users and the marketplaces it is available on. If updates were made ages ago, your app may be perceived as one that isn't supported, outdated, or potentially defective.

2. Bugs Will Harm App Quality

Even the newest kitchen sink and pipes can become a highway for roaches if they aren't taken care of properly. It's the same with apps. And whether you like it or not, bugs will "come crawling" to harm your product if you don't maintain it.

No matter how well you did building and QA testing the app in terms of quality, there's no way to avoid all possible error scenarios and envisage every possible outcome to protect the application in advance. Glitches happen, errors arise, some things stop working. So you have to keep an eye out on the areas that need to be fixed even if they're minor to keep downtime and other flaws to the minimum.

Another reason why your app has to stay up-to-date is that some errors trigger other things to malfunction, causing a domino effect. If you don't weed them out and take care of your technical debt in due time, the consequences may be very unpleasant.

3. Security Breaches Can Have Bad Outcomes

Do we have to bring up data leaks? Data theft and cyber hacks may lead to truly unwanted aftermath. Customers entrust you with personal information, and if there are breaches in the app's safety, it becomes a simpler target for hackers. The risks of cyberattacks and sensitive data getting stolen go up, while the legal proceedings might get ugly. So you'd like to ensure your systems aren't vulnerable.

4. Business Losses

The last thing you want to do is annoy your users and frustrate your customers, agree? If your app is glitchy and causes inconvenience, people will likely get irritated and may decide to stop using it altogether.

How often do people redownload deleted apps? Rarely. Either way uninstalls are bad news and not what app creators crave, as the money, time, and effort spent on making people start using the product all add up to a pretty penny that you wouldn't want to put to waste.

Lost clients and customer acquisition losses could be scarier than you think. Negative reviews, a high bounce rate, increasing cases of app deletion, and fewer app downloads can harm your sales, revenue, and reputation. Let alone provide your competitors additional advantages over your offering.

Obviously, when applications experience downtime, this is unfortunate for your business. Many financial risks come up, especially when sales take a hit. So although the costs of ongoing maintenance may seem like a burden, they are relatively easier to manage compared to the potential business losses.

Benefits of Mobile App Maintenance

Upkeeping your digital product is hard work, and mobile app support and maintenance services come at a price. But it can positively impact your business or startup marketing strategy, conversions, and overall app success. Here are several advantages worth noting.

1. Credibility and Data Safety

Better safe than sorry, huh? Handling security updates, applying patches, adhering to protocols, laws, and regulations, and taking care of other precautions helps protect the application and user data. Some companies even use badges to prove data privacy and that the system is safe. What's for other areas, choosing in favor of popular payment gateways that users are familiar with can also raise trust and make them feel calmer when entering their card details and sharing personal information.

2. App Quality

Ongoing application support is one of the ways to ensure that the app works as intended. It's a way to be alert for any hazards and handle them early on before bigger damage is caused. And it's a confirmation of quality and app relevance, that you're really delivering on your promises and bringing value.

That's what gets people to use your application, rate it well, and recommend it to others. And in addition to that, you'll have fewer app uninstalls and possibly more downloads that can bring revenue. All of this can have a favorable impact on your business, product, or startup branding. Plus, if your ranking in the marketplaces grows, it can give you an additional competitive advantage.

3. Customer Satisfaction

When your users are happy, you're meeting expectations and doing everything right. The user retention rate and your daily or monthly active users are crucial product metrics that can help you measure app usage, show how well your application is received, and whether people open it regularly. Your product should be glitch-free and intuitive if you want your user base to grow and people to come back for more instead of uninstalling it from their devices. And having it properly maintained is how you keep your hand on the pulse.

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Why Is Software Application Maintenance Challenging?

Sadly, you can't expect the application you've built to thrive on its own. Ensuring that it works without downfalls and crashes, doesn't annoy users with errors or slow load time, and is safe from cyber threats requires constant effort. And that's, indeed, a big challenge.

For instance, keeping the systems secure is a priority for most teams with released applications. But all of the app security work has to be done regularly, you can't do it one time and expect all areas to be safe for eternity, it doesn't work like that.

The same goes for the rest of the building blocks that are fundamental to the solution. Keeping app performance optimal requires effort. Operating systems, programming libraries, third-party integrations, and other tech stack inclusions might need updates and reconfiguration, so you have to keep an eye on them systematically. And as the product and startup scales, there might be a need for new integrations or additional expansion.

Designs get outdated too. Market trends evolve, but user experience is always king. If you want your app to have intuitive navigation and clean-cut and modern UX/UI design, you'll need to make design tweaks from time to time.

To put it briefly, application maintenance isn't simple. Some fixes are urgent and require taking immediate action while others imply timely clean-ups, routine reviews, and regular updates. Anyway, this is an ongoing process during which developers need to:

• monitor the code, do code diagnostics, and look through reports to trace bugs, errors, or crashes;
• quickly work on repairing bugs, fixing UX/UI flaws, and eliminating other spotted technical issues to reduce downtime;
• handle security issues and update patches to ensure data safety;
• deal with required upgrades (be it the server, hosting, operating system changes, or anything else);
• make sure the back-ups and stored data are all right;
• release the apps with updates.

Kinds of App Maintenance Services

There are several approaches to how to maintain an app, explaining the various kinds of software application support and maintenance services connected with it. What are the types of app maintenance services?

Emergency Maintenance

This type implies fixing the most urgent bugs and critical issues that prevent the users from accomplishing what they need in their user journey (e.g., opening the application, completing an order and paying for it, and so on). Approaching such crashes means handling the issue immediately without any delays. If you don't react instantly, downtime and other consequences can negatively affect the product and result in big business losses.

Emergency cases drop out of nowhere and are often unpredictable. They can arise suddenly due to overloads, server errors, performance gaps, and other vulnerable areas. In this case, your developers have to come to the rescue like an ambulance crew ready to aid the app with hotfixes.

Corrective Maintenance

Corrective support work is a lot less stressful compared to the previous type. These fixes are minor and don't make the app come to a halt, meaning that they can be taken care of in an ongoing manner. Developers tweak the app performance and logic, adjust the design defects, and remove bugs.

Adaptive Maintenance

Such maintenance mostly deals with not falling behind with all the constant technological advancements. Plus it has to do with the fact that marketplaces have their own standards that have to be met. The guidelines are updated regularly, so teams should amend their apps to fit the marketplace requirements and be compliant with the upgrades. Such tweaks regard app performance, security, design, and even the legal side.

Preventive Maintenance

This type of maintenance involves taking action in advance to cushion a hypothetic blow. Such tasks are aimed at trying to "build a safety net" and omit flaws before they happen. This includes system security enforcement, revising the documentation, and brushing up various areas of code to make it better, more scalable, and durable.

Perfective Maintenance

Finally, such app iterations are completed to make the product better. It's all about making improvements instead of straightening out and mending flaws that pop up. This work can include linking up additional integrations, tweaking the UX/UI to improve usability and navigation, mending the logic, and other tasks.

Factors Influencing the Cost of App Maintenance

What can affect the app maintenance cost? These are the major factors that determine the overall price you'll pay for post-launch support work.

The Kind of Issues You're Tackling

The costs for detecting bugs and fixing them will completely depend on the type of issue. The sum can be influenced by:

• the type of modifications required;
• how complicated the issue is;
• how long it'll take to fix it;
• the number of specialists involved;
• how often such fixes are necessary.

Specifically, the costs of maintaining an app are usually calculated in development hours (that is, how much time is spent on the work and how many specialists you involve). The math is quite straightforward here: the more people you need and the tougher the task, the higher the cost.

UX/UI Improvement Expenses

Similarly, updating your product, application, or MVP design isn't free either. Again, the cost for design updates is based on the scale of changes you want to make. As such, if you're planning a massive app redesign, it'll cost you a lot more than making a few minor UX/UI improvements. Tasks regarding user experience improvement usually come up at some point (e.g., when you need to move an element a few pixels, change the flow, or add something for promotional or other purposes).

Fees for Tools, Hosting, and Other Things

What is more, you have to keep in mind such expenses as recurring payments for subscription-based things that fuel your application. Falling back on the car example, we can compare it to the money you'll regularly spend on parking space rent, gas money, recharging your car's air conditioner, and other things. In application language, this translates to:

• hosting fees;
• marketplace listing fees (a single payment or an annual fee for keeping your app in the App Store or other markets);
• paying for third-party services;
• subscriptions for tools the team uses;
• transactional and other fees that payment gateways charge;
• and so on.

All of this can really add to the cost of app maintenance, but just like office utilities, these are inevitable expense items.

Who You Hire to Handle Maintenance

What else affects the app maintenance cost? Likewise, who handles post-launch maintenance matters too. Having your own team of developers in-house generally means higher expenses than outsourcing the work to those who provide web or mobile app maintenance services. In the latter case, some prefer to stick to the team that developed the application, while others outsource app maintenance to another team. In any event, who you hire, where they're from, and the terms you sign directly affect the cost of maintaining an app.

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How Much Does It Cost to Maintain an App?

The average post-launch service costs are around 15% to 20% of the initial price of your app's development. The exact sum you get will differ for each product, but this is a more or less realistic estimate cost to maintain an app.

So, how much does it cost to keep an app running? For instance, if you paid 150,000 USD to build your product, you should budget around 2,000 - 2,500 USD per month for its maintenance. Since the app maintenance cost per year is approximately one-fifth of the budget it took to develop the application (which is quite a lot), it makes sense to mind these expenses and include them in your calculations from the start.

It is also worth noting that creating extra features and developing additional and completely new functionality are generally standalone milestones. Such costs are calculated separately, often on a sprint basis (i.e., when a specific chunk of work is released every two weeks).

Tips on Cutting Down App Maintenance Costs

Is there a way to reduce the cost to maintain an app? Let's go over a few things you can consider doing to cut web and mobile app maintenance costs.

Handle Urgent Things First

You can minimize the cost of maintaining an app by handling only the necessary fixes, critical issues, and urgent repairs. The remaining minor ones may be placed in the backlog and handled in the course of ongoing maintenance when you have more resources to spare. It doesn't mean these tasks shouldn't be taken care of at all, though, but if you can afford to postpone some of the work, this can reduce the expenses.

Consider Cross-Platform Development

Some developers believe that cross-platform mobile app development can also be a way to save time and resources on post-release maintenance. Unlike native application development (when a separate app version is coded for each operating system), cross-platform apps let you have a single solution that works on several platforms. Such types of apps have their own benefits and downsides, but deployment and maintenance are easier to coordinate due to reusable code.

Shop Around for Discounts

What's for cutting recurring costs on tools and external services you have linked up, you can look for cheaper alternatives. For example, what if a cloud hosting provider has a better package for your solution? Or what if using both Stripe and PayPal is uncalled for and you can leave just one payment system option? The same applies to tools since you can look for startup discounts and replace expensive things with more budget-friendly ones (yet, importantly, provided that it won't harm the application and your workflows).

Find an Outsourcing Partner

Plus, as briefly mentioned before, you can also consider outsourcing the work to companies that offer development and mobile application maintenance services. As a rule, outsourcing support tasks will cost you less than having designated specialists in-house, as the latter scenario implies paying for time off, equipment, and all the other things related to internal hires. Moreover, you'll have a broader choice of specialists to select from in the vendor's talent pool. This is especially great in case you encounter an issue that requires specialized assistance, as you'll quickly have someone to help.

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5 App Maintenance Best Practices

Let's recap a few things you can do to have your application maintenance processes in place. These recommendations can help you stay organized.

Run Tests Regularly

You might receive "alarms" that something is wrong with the application from different sources, for instance, even your users can submit feedback and report bugs. However, it is best to run tests and code diagnostics on a regular basis to check whether everything is working correctly, from performance to scalability to security and beyond. Some bugs may be hiding from you, and it's your responsibility to stay alert, find them, and fix them before they do harm.

Monitor Performance

Likewise, keep an eye on the performance metrics that can signal how well your application is performing. Data analytics is a great assistant that can show that some processes are off. For instance, a high bounce rate can be a red flag that you need to review the user journey or app performance, whereas high daily and monthly active users can mean you're on the right track. You can use your own set of analytics tools, but Mixpanel or Amplitude can be powerful helpers to add to your set.

Don't Neglect Design Updates

UX/UI design isn't static either. You will sometimes need to make changes to the mockups as users don't always behave the way you expected. Great digital products are the ones that are agile and evolve with the trends. If you spot inconsistencies in the flows or user journeys or know how to improve them, this UX/UI upgrade work should be done. Sometimes even small alterations can be enough to make a change for the better, like moving elements around, restructuring the menu, or other minor tweaks.

Schedule Maintenance Work

You don't want your app to be based on outdated technology, as legacy systems often mean that your solution will be slower and less flexible than you'd like. Regular maintenance means you won't let bugs or issues with the app slip by and react quickly. It can also ensure that your backlog isn't getting piled with tasks that can improve the app.

Sticking to a schedule can really help keep timely support among the priorities. Overall, it is considered a best practice to address maintenance, application support, and updates 1 or 2 times a month. Such work can take around 20 to 40 hours per month (sometimes more) based on what you're doing.

Find Reliable People to Support Your App

Having skilled specialists responsible for the application's maintenance is also important. It's quite logical to stick with the team of developers who build the app because they know it in and out and can therefore cope with its support effectively. At times, though, such work can be passed to other parties, for example, to unburden the core team and free up their hands on building new features or other products.

Concluding Thoughts on App Maintenance Cost

As you see, app maintenance isn't optional. Post-release app support is a long-term process to handle on a rolling basis. It takes time, requires effort, and comes at a price. That's why your budget should have a unit of expenses dealing with application support and addressing unexpected issues, as coming across them is inevitable.

If you're in search of a team that can assist you with developing and upkeeping your application, Upsilon has plenty of experience with custom mobile app development and will be glad to help out. So, if you have a product in mind or could use a team for its support, feel free to reach out to us to discuss your needs!

FAQ

1. Why do you need to maintain an app after release?

Post-launch app support is integral to ensure the application is functioning as intended, free of bugs, and secure. Various updates, tweaks, compatibility changes, and upgrades are inevitable if you want to keep the app running smoothly and the users satisfied.

2. How often do apps need maintenance?

Web and mobile application maintenance has to be an ongoing support task with regular updates, tweaks, and enhancements. The frequency of updates can differ, with some doing so weekly and others on a monthly, semi-monthly, or bimonthly basis. Regular updates once or twice a month are considered a best practice.

3. Is app maintenance a fixed cost?

Generally, the cost of mobile app maintenance and support services isn't fixed, since it depends on the scope and the type of fixes. Usually, such work is calculated and paid by the hour.

4. How much does maintenance cost for an app?

On average, the app maintenance costs can be up to one-fifth of the original cost you paid for developing the application. Giving a rough estimate, it can cost around 2,000 to 2,500 USD per month if your app cost 150k USD to develop. However, the sum differs from case to case.