Care plans after launch
| Plan | Best for | What it covers | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential care | Websites and simple web apps | Platform and plugin updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring, security patches, and up to 2 hours of small changes. | $100 to $300 a month |
| Growth care | Web apps and mobile apps in daily use | Everything in Essential, plus iOS and Android release updates, error tracking, a monthly report, 10 to 20 hours of improvements, and we aim to respond within one business day. | $350 to $900 a month |
| Product care | Business-critical systems and SaaS products | Everything in Growth, plus priority response for urgent issues, on-call cover, performance tuning, and 40 or more hours of development. | $1,200 to $3,000 a month |
A yearly maintenance budget by type of product
| Product | Typical build cost | Yearly maintenance budget |
|---|---|---|
| Business website | $3,000 to $7,000 | $1,200 to $3,600 (Essential care) |
| Web app in daily use | $15,000 to $40,000 | $4,200 to $10,800 (Growth care) |
| Mobile app on iPhone and Android | $20,000 to $35,000 | $4,200 to $10,800 (Growth care) |
| SaaS product or operations platform | $50,000 to $100,000 | $14,400 to $36,000 (Product care) |
Maintenance for small websites is a higher share of the build cost because some work, such as security updates and backups, is the same however small the site is. Business-critical products with on-call cover sit at the top of the rule.
Why software needs maintenance
Software does not wear out, but everything around it changes. Apple and Google release new versions of iOS and Android every year. Browsers update every few weeks. The frameworks and libraries your software is built on release security fixes. Payment providers and other services change how their connections work. Each change can break something that worked perfectly the day before.
Maintenance keeps your software working through those changes, protects it from new security threats, and gives you a steady flow of improvements as your business learns what it needs.
The four kinds of maintenance work
Updates keep the platform, libraries, and plugins current, so known security holes are closed.
Monitoring watches uptime, errors, and performance, and alerts someone before customers notice a problem.
Fixes deal with the bugs that real use always uncovers, and with breakages caused by changes in other systems.
Improvements are small changes and new features: a new report, a better form, a faster page. This is where most of the value lies, and where a fixed number of hours each month pays off.
Key points
- Updates and security patches
- Monitoring, backups, and alerts
- Fixes for bugs and broken connections
- Improvements, in a fixed number of hours
The 15 to 25 percent rule
A useful rule of thumb is to budget 15 to 25 percent of the build cost each year for maintenance. A $40,000 web app needs $6,000 to $10,000 a year, and more if the business wants regular improvements.
Small websites break the rule. Their build cost is low, but some work, such as backups, uptime monitoring, and security updates, costs the same however small the site is. That is why our smallest plan starts at $100 a month.
Running costs that are not maintenance
Hosting is the cost of the servers or cloud services your software runs on. For most business websites and apps it is modest, from $20 to $300 a month. Third-party services, such as email delivery, maps, search, payment processing, and AI usage, are billed by their providers. App store accounts cost $99 a year for Apple and a one-time $25 for Google.
We list all of these separately and, wherever possible, set them up in your name.
What happens if you skip maintenance
Unmaintained software rarely fails all at once. It degrades. A plugin stops working after a browser update. An app crashes on the newest phones. A security patch is missed, and the site is compromised. Eventually, catching up costs more than steady maintenance would have, and sometimes a rebuild is the only option.
What is included in our care plans
Essential care suits websites and simple web apps: updates, daily backups, uptime monitoring, security patches, and up to 2 hours of small changes each month. Growth care suits web and mobile apps in daily use: everything in Essential, plus iPhone and Android release updates, error tracking, a monthly report, and 10 to 20 hours of improvements. Product care suits business-critical systems: priority response for urgent issues, on-call cover, performance tuning, and 40 or more hours of development a month.
How to keep maintenance costs down
Build it well the first time. Software with automated tests, clear documentation, and few unnecessary dependencies is cheaper to maintain for its whole life. A low build price that skips these things usually costs more within a year.
Use fewer plugins and third-party services. Every dependency is one more thing to update and one more thing that can break. We often replace several overlapping plugins with a small piece of custom code that never needs a subscription.
Batch small changes. Collecting requests and releasing them together each month is cheaper than a stream of one-off fixes.
Plan major updates before they become urgent. Framework versions are supported for a set number of years, and moving to the next one on a planned schedule costs a fraction of an emergency upgrade.
Key points
- Automated tests and documentation from the start
- Fewer plugins and services
- Monthly batches of small changes
- Planned upgrades before support ends
A worked example
Picture a services company with a customer portal built two years ago by another supplier. Nobody has updated it since launch. It still works, but it runs on an outdated framework version with known security issues, and a payment provider has announced it will retire the connection the portal uses.
The first step is a one-off catch-up: updating the framework, replacing the payment connection, and adding monitoring, quoted at about $5,000. After that, the portal moves to Growth care at $1,500 a month, including 12 hours of improvements. The company now gets a monthly report, and the backlog of small requests finally moves.