How Much Does it Cost to Maintain An App?

Seeing an application go live after several months of effort you have put on its software development and design work gives you a mind-blowing feeling. However, if you think your all work has been completed with app development, publishing in the app store or play store, and marketing it amazingly for alluring clients, you are wrong. After building a mobile app successfully, you must maintain it. And app maintenance draws some extra costs. Moreover, inadequate app maintenance can be a reason behind an app failure. Why Is App Maintenance Necessitous? Focusing on app maintenance will remunerate in the long run. It has proven that increasing the app retention rates by only 5% increases the profits of an organization by anywhere between 25% and 95%. Maintaining an app is necessitous as each app on the store requires it for surviving. Things like performance requirements, changes in design popularity, new device launches, new operating system launches are some purposes for having an app maintenance strategy before starting the development process. So, no matter how properly you developed an app, you always need to maintain it. Factors to Consider For Calculating Mobile App Maintenance Many examples of app development cost analysis are available online, but you can get puzzled instead of being guided if you check them. Some areas can highly impact your app development cost. It can be said that yearly average app maintenance expenses can be calculated at 15 to 20% of the total development expenses invested in launching the MVP model of your app. Here are the top 3 factors that you must ponder for estimating mobile app maintenance cost: Development Team Spot Costs of app development are different across the globe. The USA has the highest rates. The highest rates can be expected in Switzerland in Europe, whereas Eastern and Central Europe have one of the lowest rates. Moreover, developers in some nations outperform others. Software Complication Your app maintenance costs will increase if your app gets more screens and features. The app-building technology you select also plays a pivotal role. If you built 2 separate native apps for Android and iOS, your maintenance could be costlier than using a cross-platform solution like React Native. The number of third-party integrations is another factor to ponder. If your application is highly connected with external services like accounting systems, social media, or payment platforms, you can anticipate more maintenance costs. Design of the App To keep affordable maintenance costs, you must hire experienced software designers in the first phases of the app-building. If your app design is not good, it can cost you more maintenance expenses in the long run. So, employ experienced developers who know the ways of managing legacy code and design so that they can boost your product gradually at the time of app maintenance. How Much Does It Cost For App Maintenance? It’s not only an app development expense but the maintenance cost also. You should be ready before going for building an app. The app maintenance cost varies from app to app. On average, it can cost you nearly 20% of your actual expenses of mobile app development. Things to Remember While Considering App Maintenance Costs Here are some factors that you should remember while pondering the expenses of maintaining an application: Analytics Tools like Google Analytics offer lots of data to help you make the right decisions for tracking users’ usage and get reports that give your answers. Free tools are available but advanced tools give more info. It’s also the expense in time as you will require somebody for spending time applying this and checking everything. Analytics is also essential for performance problems like glitches, crashes, and other bugs. You will need to troubleshoot these as they come up for different purposes beyond only the launches of new OS versions. Hosting You require paying the database and backend of your app hosted for your app to perform well. Many hosting options are there like a cloud-based environment. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is one of the cloud services that will be less costly as you just pay for your usage and there will be less set up and maintenance expense of the server. Third-party When you use something in your app that is coming from somebody else, you will need to pay for it monthly. For instance, you will need to pay for a licensed technology that you utilize. Bugs and Updates Updates are important with every technology. Every app gets updated versions. Simply open the store and check the description, you will find the required updates there. These updates’ costs rely on many factors. In case you just have a bug that should be solved in the line of code, it can cost you nearly $50. If you want to update the whole performance aspect that could take many weeks for troubleshooting, the updates can take almost $1000 to $2000. Also, it relies on the app size and how properly it functions. Marketing You need user engagement and marketing functions to get and retain users. Many free things are there to do, but paying a bit can get your name out there. You can invest from $100 to $250000 in marketing based on your budget and activities you require. A good marketing team can customize a marketing plan as per your application and budget. Client Support Listen to your users to be successful truly. Address every user complaint. Hire a dedicated employee for responding to users and get good reviews. This will continuously cost you also but not a lot. App Security Ensuring your app security is another essential maintenance cost you must budget for. You need to ponder 2 areas – legally-imposed changes and ongoing security optimization. To ensure you won’t put sensitive user data in danger, developers will require tracking all privacy updates or changes of the third-party integrations. Leaving an update unidentified could bring a security violation. Hence, you will require remembering legal changes like GDPR that shake-up always the

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