Matt Turley, Continuum. Updated October 14, 2026.
Application maintenance is the steady work that keeps an app you already own running, such as security patches, library updates, monitoring and fixes when something breaks. Paying someone to watch the app and fix it starts at $500/mo with us, and the hosting tools behind it cost far less.
An app is not finished the day it launches. The tools it is built on keep changing, and attackers keep finding holes in old versions of them. Maintenance is the work of keeping up with that so your app does not slowly stop working.
Software people split it into four kinds. Corrective work fixes bugs. Preventive work patches and updates before something breaks. Adaptive work follows outside changes, such as a new phone update or a payment provider changing its rules. Improving work adds small features. Most owners only think of the first one, and the other three are where apps quietly rot.
Before anyone touches the code, the app has running costs. Vercel hosting is $20 a month on its Pro plan, Supabase's database is from $25 a month, Sentry error tracking is $26 a month on the Team plan billed yearly, and UptimeRobot checks start at $12 a month billed yearly (each vendor's own pricing page, read September 2026).
Add those up and the tools for a small business app stay modest. A phone app adds Apple's developer program at $99 a year, and Google Play's one-time $25 registration. Those numbers are real, and they are the small part of the bill. The large part is the person who reads the alerts and acts on them.
The market is wide. WP Buffs lists WordPress care plans from $89 to $359 a month. Afterbuild Labs lists a support retainer at $3,499 a month for 40 hours. Between those, a custom business app often has nobody offering a plain monthly price (provider pricing pages, read September 2026).
Ours are flat, month to month, and never hourly. Keep-alive is $500/mo for monitoring, security and dependency patching, and incident triage. Care is $2,000/mo and adds a couple of small fixes or features a month. Cancel when it stops being worth it. For the same sums broken down by type of app, see what it costs to maintain a SaaS app.
An app with a maintenance plan on paper can still be neglected. Ask whoever runs yours whether each of these is done and when it was last done:
An expired certificate or a lapsed developer account takes an app offline overnight, and it is the cheapest outage to prevent.
If the app breaks every week, or the person who built it is gone, a monthly plan is the wrong first purchase. You would pay every month to watch something you cannot trust. Have it read first. A written read of the code is $299 with us and tells you which problems are real. If the answer is that it needs work, making a fast-built app stable runs $4,000 to $15,000, and after that the monthly plan is cheap.
The same goes when the previous developer left without handing over the accounts. Our developer left page covers what to ask for first.
For a civic nonprofit we shipped a voter guide with a web app, an iOS app that went through Apple review, an admin console and a daily data pipeline pulling from state election records. Every one of those is a thing that can fail without anyone clicking a button: a feed that changes format, an Apple requirement that moves. That is what maintenance is for. The build is on the voter guide proof page.
Write down every account the app depends on and whose name each is under. Find out when the last backup ran. Then decide: if the app is stable, ask for a flat monthly price like Keep-alive. If it is not, start with a Ship Check and then Ship Fix.
Thirty minutes, and you leave knowing whether it needs a rescue or just a routine.