What’s a fair price for app maintenance? A checklist for buyers

Breakdown of maintenance scope—infra, OS updates, incidents, and minor changes—plus questions to keep budgets predictable.

Maintenance matters as much as initial build. Use this checklist to scope and price support realistically.

Typical maintenance items

• Infra/hosting: driven by traffic and redundancy; confirm monitoring and backups.
• OS/library updates: agree on how to track and ship iOS/Android updates several times a year.
• Incident response SLA: define coverage hours, response targets, and contact paths.
• Minor changes: clarify how many hours of copy/UI tweaks are included monthly.

Questions to ask vendors

• Are monitoring and backup frequency included and costed?
• Is there a written policy for annual iOS/Android updates?
• Who responds to incidents and when? What is the escalation?
• What’s the hourly rate for changes beyond the included scope?

Takeaway

Clear scope and pricing for maintenance keeps budgets predictable. If you want a plan aligned to your operations team, we can design one together.