Software Maintenance Cost After Launch: What to Budget Each Year

Most budgets stop at launch day. The product does not. Servers keep running, operating systems update, libraries publish security fixes, and users find edge cases nobody tested. Software maintenance cost is the money you spend every year to keep a live product secure, working and useful. This guide explains what it covers, what is typical in India, and how to stop it from becoming a surprise.

Quick answer

• A common planning figure is 15–25% of the original build cost per year for maintenance and small improvements.
• A ₹10 lakh web app would therefore need roughly ₹1.5–2.5 lakh a year, plus hosting and third-party services.
• Mobile apps sit at the higher end because Apple and Google change their requirements every year.
• New features are not maintenance. Budget them separately, or the maintenance line will look out of control.

What maintenance actually includes

When a vendor quotes for maintenance, ask which of these are included. They are different kinds of work with different costs.

• Corrective: fixing bugs reported by users or found in monitoring.
• Adaptive: keeping up with the outside world, such as new iOS and Android versions, browser changes, payment gateway API updates and expiring SSL certificates.
• Preventive: upgrading frameworks and libraries, patching security issues, cleaning up slow database queries before they become outages.
• Operational: backups, uptime monitoring, log review, server updates and incident response.
• Small improvements: copy changes, a new report column, a tweak to a form. Useful, but this is where scope quietly grows.

Typical yearly budgets in India

These ranges assume a professional team with monitoring, a staging environment and documented releases. A freelancer who fixes things when they break will cost less until the day nobody answers the phone.

• Marketing website or simple portal: ₹30,000 – ₹1 lakh a year. Mostly updates, backups and security patches.
• Business web application (dashboards, roles, integrations): ₹1.5 – ₹5 lakh a year.
• Mobile app on iOS and Android with a backend: ₹2 – ₹6 lakh a year, because both stores require regular updates to keep the app listed and working on new phones.
• SaaS product with paying customers: usually a monthly retainer or a small dedicated team, because uptime and response time now affect revenue.

If you are still budgeting the build itself, start with our guides to web application development cost and mobile app development cost.

Running costs that sit outside maintenance

Developer time is only part of the yearly cost. These bills arrive whether or not anyone touches the code:

• Cloud hosting, databases, file storage and bandwidth
• Domain, email delivery (transactional email services) and SMS or WhatsApp messaging
• Apple Developer Program and Google Play developer accounts
• Paid APIs such as maps, payments, AI models and analytics tools
• Error tracking and uptime monitoring tools

Ask your developer for a list of every paid service the product depends on, with the account owner for each. That list is also your protection if you ever change vendors.

What makes maintenance expensive

• No automated tests. Every change needs manual checking, and fixes break other things.
• Old framework versions. Skipping upgrades for years turns a routine update into a migration project. Our guide to modernising legacy PHP software covers what that looks like.
• Missing documentation. New developers spend paid hours working out how the system fits together.
• Accounts in the vendor's name. Hosting, app store and repository access you do not control slows every fix.
• Unclear priorities. When everything is urgent, nothing gets planned and costs go up.

Three ways to pay for maintenance

1. Monthly retainer: a fixed number of hours each month with agreed response times. Predictable, and best for live products with real users.
2. Pay as you go: billed per request. Fine for a stable website, risky for anything that earns money.
3. Dedicated developer: one or more engineers who know the product and handle maintenance plus improvements. Makes sense once the product is growing every month. See in-house vs dedicated teams.

How to keep maintenance predictable

• Agree response times in writing, for example same day for an outage and two business days for a minor bug.
• Schedule framework and library upgrades every quarter instead of every few years.
• Keep a separate budget line for new features.
• Review the monthly log of what was fixed and why. Patterns show you where the product needs real work.
• Make sure source code, hosting and app store accounts are owned by your company.

Frequently asked questions

How much does software maintenance cost per year?

A common planning figure is 15–25% of the original build cost per year, plus hosting and paid third-party services. Products with many integrations, mobile apps and SaaS platforms with paying customers usually sit at the higher end.

Is maintenance included in the development price?

Usually only a short warranty period, often 30–90 days, for fixing defects in delivered work. After that, maintenance is a separate agreement. Check the contract for the exact warranty length and what it covers.

Can a different company maintain software we did not build with them?

Yes. A good team starts with a short code and infrastructure audit, documents what it finds, and then takes over. Make sure you own the source code repository and all hosting and app store accounts before you switch.