What it costs to keep an app alive

The hardest part of owning a mobile app is the part nobody quotes you for: keeping it alive after launch. The build has a price and an end date. The upkeep has neither. It is the line item that gets cut first and missed most, right up until the day it stops being optional.

So what does it actually cost to keep an app alive, and what does it cost not to? Here is the honest version.

The rule of thumb, and what moves it

A common industry rule of thumb puts annual upkeep at around 15 to 20 percent of what the app cost to build. Spend $200,000 on the build and you should plan for roughly $30,000 to $40,000 a year to keep it healthy. Treat that as a planning figure, not a law. It is a starting point, and the real number moves with the app.

What pushes it up is rarely new features. It is the ground shifting under the app while it sits still. Apple and Google ship a new operating system every year and change the rules for what they will accept. The libraries your app depends on release security patches and breaking changes. The backend it talks to moves on. None of that is your idea, and all of it lands on your bill. An app kept roughly current absorbs it cheaply. An app left alone lets it compound.

The bill you do not see coming

Skipping upkeep does not save the money. It defers it, and adds interest. The cost arrives later, in a lump, at the worst time. It shows up in three ways.

It disappears from the stores. Both stores enforce a floor that rises every year. Miss it and the app does not crash, it just stops being offered to new users on newer phones, and you lose the ability to ship updates at all. We covered exactly how that happens in the Google Play deadline piece. The lost installs are quiet, and they do not come back on their own.

A security hole sits open. An app you cannot update is an app you cannot patch. When a dependency or an OS flaw turns up, the apps under active care get a fix and the neglected ones get exposure. For anything touching customer data, that is the cost that does not stay on the balance sheet.

The catch-up becomes a rebuild. Two or three years of skipped updates do not add up, they multiply. An app far enough behind, or sitting on an end-of-life framework like Xamarin, is no longer a maintenance job. It is an emergency project, on someone else's timeline, usually costing a meaningful fraction of the original build. The 15 percent you skipped becomes a number with more digits.

Why a fixed monthly fee wins

The problem with upkeep is not only the amount, it is the shape. Done reactively, it is a flat line of nothing followed by a spike you did not budget for. A fixed monthly fee trades that spike for a number you can plan around, and it changes the incentive: the work happens steadily, before it becomes urgent, because that is the cheapest way to run it.

That is how App Care is priced. We run the mobile apps you have already paid to build for a set monthly fee: Silver at $2,990 a month, Gold at $5,090. Maintenance is the product, not the thing we tolerate while waiting to sell you a rebuild. The point is that the rebuild never has to happen.

What the fee actually buys

The honest list is short and unglamorous. Keeping the app on supported operating systems and current store requirements, so it stays in the App Store and Google Play. Taking the security and dependency updates as they land, instead of in a panic. Watching the platforms so you do not have to, and telling you what is coming before it arrives. Silver covers the keep-it-alive essentials; Gold adds more room for changes and a faster response. Which one fits depends on the app, and that is a five-minute conversation, not a hard sell.

If you do not know which side of any of this your app sits on, that is the normal starting point, and it is exactly what the free check is for. Brisbane-based.

Sources

1. Google, "Meet Google Play's target API level requirement", Android Developers. Non-compliant apps stop being available to new users on devices running a newer Android version than the app targets. https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk
2. Apple, "SDK minimum requirements", Upcoming Requirements, Apple Developer. Apps uploaded to App Store Connect must be built with a current Xcode and iOS SDK, so an app that cannot be rebuilt cannot ship an update. https://developer.apple.com/news/upcoming-requirements/
3. The 15 to 20 percent of build cost per year figure is a widely used industry rule of thumb for software upkeep, not a precise standard; treat it as a planning range. The App Care prices quoted (Silver $2,990, Gold $5,090 per month) are Donnish's own published rates.