The work does not stop once you have built a piece of bespoke software. You will need to pay to host it in a cloud environment, and you may have monthly fees for any third-party services you have used. You can also expect to find a few bugs in the first few months that were missed in testing. All of this adds up and needs to be budgeted for.
Key takeaways
- It is worth budgeting 15% to 20% of the initial build cost just to keep an application running, i.e. £4,500 to £6,000 a year on a £30,000 build.
- The budget will cover cloud infrastructure costs, bug fixing and keeping dependencies up to date.
- If your application integrates with third-party services, you may be forced into changes when they are updated.
- Plan a separate budget for new features and changes requested by users.
Ongoing costs
Once an application has been built, you can expect the following ongoing costs.
- Where it runs. Most applications are hosted in a cloud service like Azure or AWS. A simple application with a database can easily cost £150 a month just to run it. The more complex your application's architecture, the more this will cost. As your business grows, your hosting costs will also increase to cope with the number of users.
- What testing missed. Even though you have tested your application thoroughly you can expect to find a few bugs once it has gone live. Sometimes they will be minor and you are happy to live with them, but you should assume you will find at least one major bug that has to be fixed.
- What outside services it pays for. If you have used a third-party service to provide functionality like authentication or databases, you will need to pay a monthly fee. These fees are often based on usage, and so will grow with your user base.
- What it is built on. Every piece of software is built on other people's software, which is updated constantly. Some updates you can skip, but when a vulnerability has been found, you will need to update your application too.
- What the platforms force on you. All operating systems are updated regularly. Usually this will not affect you, but if you do not keep your software up to date, eventually you will hit an incompatibility that causes you a problem.
- Who picks up the phone. What happens when something breaks at four o'clock on a Friday? If your application is business critical you will need someone to be available to look at problems right away.
Our guide to what bespoke software costs in the UK covers the build side and the day rates behind all of this.
Maintenance contracts
Unless you have expertise within your team, you will need a supplier to keep things running. A typical maintenance contract covers hosting your application, keeping the infrastructure and dependencies up to date, and applying security patches when they are needed.
The key benefits are that you have someone keeping an eye on things, and someone to call if there is an outage.
Your application will need changes even if it is just a few bug fixes. Simple fixes may be covered by a maintenance contract, but for anything beyond that there are two options.
A retainer gives you up to a fixed number of days a month. This suits businesses that expect a steady stream of small changes and would rather not negotiate each one.
The alternative approach is to pay as you go. You agree each piece of work as it comes up and it is priced like any other work with cost depending on how clearly you can describe it.
What to do next
Think about running costs before you commission a build rather than after it.
Make sure you understand what is included in any maintenance contract. What does the annual figure include, what counts as a change rather than maintenance, and whose name the hosting and third-party accounts are in?
If you have software running now and no clear idea what it should be costing you, tell us what you have and roughly what it does. We will give you an honest view of whether what you are paying is reasonable. If your system needs ongoing development we will happily talk with you about that.
FAQs
Is maintenance included in the price of the build?
Usually not, so it is worth asking before you sign rather than afterwards. Most quotes cover building the software and handing it over, with hosting, third-party fees and support all charged separately. Some suppliers will fix defects free of charge for a few months after launch, but that is not the same as maintenance, so ask what happens once that period ends.
What happens if we do not maintain it?
Your application will keep running and for a while you will not notice anything wrong. But your dependencies will fall further behind, certificates will expire and the platforms your software runs on will keep changing. When you do finally need a change made, it will take longer and cost you more than it would have done if you had kept on top of it.
Do we need a retainer, or can we pay as we go?
That depends on how much change you expect. A retainer gives you a set number of days each month, which works well if you know there will be a steady stream of small changes and you would rather not agree a price every time. If your changes are occasional and hard to predict, paying as you go will usually work out cheaper. Either way you will still need someone covering the hosting and patching, and that is a separate arrangement.