The most expensive misconception in app development is that the cost ends at launch. It does not. Launching your app is the beginning of an ongoing investment, and if you have not planned for it, you are going to be caught off guard by the bills that start arriving in month two.
The industry standard for annual app maintenance is 15-20% of the original development cost. For an app that cost $200,000 to build, you should budget $30,000-$40,000 per year for maintenance. For a $500,000 app, that number is $75,000-$100,000.
Those numbers surprise a lot of founders and business owners. They should not. Software is a living thing, and the environment it exists in is constantly changing. Here is a detailed breakdown of where that money goes and why every category is necessary.
Operating System Updates
Apple and Google release major OS updates annually, and both follow them with a steady cadence of minor updates throughout the year. iOS 20 and Android 17 are the current versions as of early 2026, and each introduced changes that required updates to existing apps.
What OS Updates Break
Deprecated APIs. Every OS release deprecates older APIs and introduces new ones. When an API your app depends on is deprecated, it continues to work for a while. But "a while" has a shelf life. Eventually, the deprecated API is removed entirely, and if you have not migrated, your app breaks.
Permission model changes. Both platforms regularly tighten their permission models, particularly around privacy. An app that accessed location data, contacts, or health information using a method that was acceptable last year may need to be updated to comply with new permission requirements.
UI framework changes. SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose are evolving rapidly. If your app uses these frameworks, OS updates can change component behavior, layout calculations, or animation timing in ways that affect your user experience.
Background processing rules. Both platforms continue to restrict what apps can do in the background to preserve battery life. Background fetch intervals, notification handling, and background task execution are all areas where OS updates can silently change your app's behavior.
The Cost
Budget 2-4% of your original development cost annually for OS compatibility updates. For most apps, this means one to two focused development sprints per year aligned with major OS releases.
Bug Fixes and Stability
No matter how thorough your testing, bugs will emerge in production. Users have an extraordinary ability to find edge cases, device-specific issues, and usage patterns that no QA team would anticipate.
Categories of Post-Launch Bugs
Device-specific issues. The Android ecosystem alone has thousands of active device models with different screen sizes, aspect ratios, chipsets, and manufacturer-specific OS modifications. An app that works flawlessly on a Pixel 9 might behave differently on a Samsung Galaxy S26 because Samsung's OneUI modifies standard Android behavior.
Edge case crashes. Users with poor connectivity, full storage, outdated OS versions, or unusual accessibility settings will encounter crashes that never appeared in testing. These are not hypothetical. Every app we have launched at Apptitude has had edge case bugs surface within the first few months.
Memory leaks. Performance degradation that only appears after extended use sessions. A memory leak might not crash the app during a five-minute test, but it will cause problems for a user who keeps the app open for hours.
Concurrency issues. Race conditions and threading bugs that appear only under specific timing conditions. These are notoriously difficult to reproduce in development but occur reliably at scale.
The Cost
Budget 3-5% of your original development cost annually for ongoing bug fixes. The first year after launch typically skews higher as you address the initial wave of production issues. Subsequent years tend to stabilize as the most common bugs are resolved.
Server and Infrastructure Costs
If your app has any backend component, you have ongoing infrastructure costs. These include hosting, databases, CDN, email delivery, push notifications, analytics, and monitoring.
Common Infrastructure Line Items
Cloud hosting. AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure charges for compute, storage, and data transfer. These costs scale with usage, which is good news (you only pay for what you use) and bad news (a viral moment can generate a surprising bill).
Database hosting. Managed database services like RDS, Cloud SQL, or MongoDB Atlas charge based on instance size, storage, and read/write throughput. As your data grows, these costs increase.
CDN and media storage. If your app serves images, videos, or other media content, you are paying for storage and delivery. Services like CloudFront, Cloudflare, or Fastly charge based on bandwidth.
Third-party services. Push notification services, email delivery (SendGrid, Mailgun), SMS (Twilio), payment processing (Stripe), analytics (Mixpanel, Amplitude), and error monitoring (Sentry, Datadog) all have usage-based pricing that grows with your user base.
SSL certificates and domain management. Minor but recurring costs for keeping your domain names active and your connections secure.
The Cost
Infrastructure costs vary enormously based on your app's architecture and user base. A simple app with a few thousand users might spend $200-$500 per month on infrastructure. A data-intensive app with hundreds of thousands of users can easily spend $5,000-$20,000 per month.
The key is to architect for cost efficiency from the start. Decisions made during initial development, like choosing between serverless and container-based architectures, selecting the right database technology, and implementing caching strategies, have a compounding effect on infrastructure costs over time.
Feature Iteration
Your app is not finished at launch. It should not be. The most successful apps are the ones that continuously evolve based on user feedback, market changes, and business strategy.
Why You Cannot Stop Building
User expectations evolve. The features that impressed users at launch become table stakes within a year. Your competitors are shipping, and users are comparing. If your app stagnates, users leave.
You learn from real usage data. Launch gives you access to information you could not have had during development: how users actually behave versus how you assumed they would behave. This data reveals opportunities for improvement that are worth acting on.
Business needs change. New revenue streams, partnerships, market segments, and business models require new capabilities in your app. The app you launched for your initial market may need significant additions to serve adjacent markets.
Platform capabilities expand. New OS features, hardware capabilities, and platform APIs create opportunities to enhance your app in ways that were not possible at launch. Widgets, live activities, spatial computing integrations, and new payment methods are all examples of platform features that can meaningfully improve your app's value proposition.
The Cost
Feature iteration is the most variable maintenance cost and depends entirely on your product roadmap. However, most apps benefit from a steady cadence of updates. Budget 5-10% of your original development cost annually for incremental feature development, with the understanding that major new features may require additional investment beyond the maintenance budget.
Security Patches
Security is not a one-time effort. New vulnerabilities are discovered constantly in the libraries, frameworks, and platforms your app depends on. Responding to them promptly is not optional.
What Security Maintenance Includes
Dependency updates. Your app uses dozens of third-party libraries, and each one is a potential attack surface. When a vulnerability is discovered in a library you depend on, you need to update to a patched version and verify that the update does not break anything.
Authentication updates. Authentication standards evolve. Token handling, session management, and credential storage best practices change over time. Keeping your authentication implementation current reduces your exposure to credential-based attacks.
Encryption standards. Encryption algorithms that were considered secure can become vulnerable as computing power increases and new attack methods are developed. Your app's encryption implementation should be reviewed periodically and updated as standards change.
Penetration testing. Annual or semi-annual penetration testing by qualified security professionals identifies vulnerabilities that automated tools miss. This is particularly important for apps that handle financial data, health information, or other sensitive user data.
Compliance updates. Privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and industry-specific requirements like HIPAA and PCI-DSS are updated periodically. Your app needs to stay compliant as these regulations evolve.
The Cost
Budget 2-4% of your original development cost annually for security maintenance. Apps in regulated industries (healthcare, finance) should budget toward the higher end of this range. A security breach costs far more than proactive maintenance, both in direct costs and in the reputational damage that follows.
Third-Party API Changes
Your app almost certainly depends on external APIs, and those APIs change. Payment processors update their SDKs. Social media platforms modify their authentication flows. Mapping services adjust their pricing tiers. Analytics platforms change their data collection methods.
Why API Changes Are Disruptive
Third-party APIs change on their own schedules, not yours. When Stripe releases a new API version and deprecates the old one, you do not get to decide whether to update. You update or your payment processing stops working.
The same applies to authentication providers (Auth0, Firebase Auth), social login (Apple, Google, Facebook), mapping services (Google Maps, Mapbox), and any other external service your app relies on.
The Cost
Budget 1-3% of your original development cost annually for third-party API updates. The actual cost depends on how many external services your app integrates with and how frequently those services make breaking changes.
App Store Compliance
Both Apple's App Store and Google Play Store regularly update their policies, and apps that do not comply risk being removed. Recent years have seen increasingly strict requirements around privacy disclosures, data handling transparency, subscription management, and content moderation.
What Compliance Maintenance Includes
Privacy nutrition labels. Both stores require detailed disclosures about what data your app collects and how it is used. When you add new features or change data handling practices, these disclosures need to be updated.
Review guideline changes. Apple in particular is known for retroactively applying new guidelines to existing apps. Features that were approved during initial review can be flagged as violations during a subsequent update review.
SDK requirements. Both platforms periodically raise the minimum SDK version and API level requirements. Apps that target older SDK versions are eventually removed from the stores.
The Cost
Budget 1-2% of your original development cost annually for app store compliance. This is largely defensive spending: the cost of non-compliance (having your app removed from the store) is far higher than the cost of staying current.
Putting It All Together
Here is a summary of the annual maintenance budget as a percentage of original development cost:
| Category | Annual Cost (% of Original Build) |
|---|---|
| OS updates | 2-4% |
| Bug fixes | 3-5% |
| Infrastructure | Variable (see above) |
| Feature iteration | 5-10% |
| Security patches | 2-4% |
| Third-party API changes | 1-3% |
| App store compliance | 1-2% |
| Total (excluding infrastructure) | 14-28% |
The 15-20% rule of thumb is a reasonable midpoint for most apps. Apps with higher complexity, more integrations, or stricter compliance requirements will trend toward the higher end.
How to Budget for Maintenance
Build Maintenance Into Your Initial Planning
The biggest mistake I see is treating maintenance as an afterthought. When you are planning your app budget, include at least two years of maintenance costs in your financial model. An app that costs $200,000 to build actually costs $260,000-$280,000 over the first two years when you factor in maintenance.
Establish a Maintenance Retainer
Rather than addressing maintenance reactively, establish a monthly retainer with your development partner. This ensures you have dedicated development resources available when issues arise and lets you plan proactively rather than scrambling when something breaks.
Prioritize Ruthlessly
Not all maintenance is equal. Security patches and OS compatibility updates are non-negotiable. Feature iteration can be prioritized based on user impact and business value. Understanding which maintenance activities are urgent versus important helps you allocate your budget effectively.
Monitor Proactively
Invest in monitoring and alerting tools that catch problems before your users do. Error tracking (Sentry), performance monitoring (Datadog), and uptime monitoring (Pingdom) cost relatively little compared to the cost of discovering problems through user complaints and bad reviews.
The Bottom Line
App maintenance is not a cost you can avoid. It is the cost of having a working product in a changing environment. The apps that thrive are the ones whose owners understand this from the beginning and budget accordingly.
If you are planning an app and want to understand the full lifecycle cost, not just the build cost, we can help you model it realistically. Start a conversation with our team to discuss your project, or explore our services to see how we approach long-term app development partnerships.
The best time to plan for maintenance is before you start building. The second best time is now.