Web App Maintenance Cost: What to Budget per Year for 3 App Sizes

Web app maintenance cost typically runs €2,000-7,500 a year for a small internal tool, €5,500-23,000 for a customer-facing app with logins and payments, and from around €15,000 for a platform or SaaS product. That budget covers hosting, updates, monitoring, backups and the small fixes every live app needs, but not new features. These are my rough estimates excluding VAT, based on typical hours and the rates experienced European freelancers charge.

I'm a freelance developer based in Denmark and I sell maintenance myself, so keep that in mind. I'll also tell you when you can get away with spending less than the table suggests.

The short answer: yearly budgets by app size

The hours are priced at €90-150 an hour. For reference, the freelancermap survey of more than 5,000 IT freelancers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland puts the 2026 average for development roles at €91 an hour, and Nordic and UK seniors usually charge more. Hosting and tool costs are converted roughly from vendor prices, most of which are listed in US dollars.

A quick way to place your app: if only your team logs in, it's small. If your customers log in and pay, it's medium. If several groups use it or it bills subscriptions, it's large. These sizes match the levels in my breakdown of web app development cost, so you can put the build budget and the running budget side by side. For the wider picture of what software costs over its lifetime, start with my software development cost guide.

Where the money goes

Each line maps to one area of keeping an app alive. What the work involves day to day, and who should own it, is covered in my guide to web application maintenance. This section is about the price tag.

Hosting and services

Hosting is rarely the biggest line, even though it's the one most people think of first. It covers servers, the database, domains, certificates, transactional email, file storage and backup storage.

A typical setup for a Laravel app is a virtual server from a cloud provider plus a tool to manage it. Laravel Forge costs $12-39 a month depending on the plan, and you pay the server provider separately. A small server usually costs somewhere between a few euros and a few tens of euros a month, which is why a modest internal tool can run on well under €100 a month, everything included.

The bill grows as the architecture does: a separate managed database, queue workers for background jobs, more than one server and a staging environment (a copy of the app for testing). Staging is a line many budgets leave out. It can cost nearly as much as production, but it's where updates get tested before your customers see them.

For European businesses, I recommend an EU hosting region. The mainstream providers all offer one, and keeping servers and backups in the EU keeps GDPR data transfer questions simple. Payment processing fees and AI usage charges are left out of the table, because they scale with your revenue and usage rather than with maintenance.

Updates and security

Measured in hours, this is the biggest fixed line. Laravel gives each major version 18 months of bug fixes and two years of security fixes, and a new major version ships every year (Laravel's support policy). PHP and your JavaScript packages run on schedules of their own. Leave an app untouched and within about two years it's running on versions that no longer get security patches.

The hours go into a routine: check dependencies for known vulnerabilities, update, run the automated tests, verify on staging and deploy. For an internal tool that can be a 3-5 hour round each quarter. For a customer-facing app I recommend a monthly round, and a platform with many integrations needs more.

I've included the yearly major-version upgrade in these hours. Laravel says it aims to make each major upgrade possible in a day or less, which holds for apps that are kept current and have tests. If your app is several versions behind, that's a separate project. Check what a Laravel upgrade typically costs before you fix your budget.

Monitoring and backups

The tools are cheap. Sentry has a free plan for one user, and its Team plan costs $26 a month billed annually. Oh Dear, which watches uptime, certificates and scheduled tasks, starts at $17 a month for two sites. Off-site backups can often use your hosting provider's object storage for a few euros.

What costs money is the time: routing alerts to a named person, responding when they fire, and restoring from backup a couple of times a year to prove it works. A restore test usually takes a few hours. Larger apps add longer log retention, a status page and time for incident response.

Small fixes and support

This is the line that varies most. It covers bugs users report, a label that needs changing, a new column in an export, and adjustments when a third-party API changes. It isn't new development, but it's never zero either.

My rule of thumb for where to draw the line: if a change takes less than half a day and doesn't change how the app works, it's a small fix. Anything bigger is development and gets its own estimate. I recommend agreeing on a monthly allowance up front, for example 2-5 hours for a customer-facing app, with the developer asking before going over it.

Why the percentage rule breaks for small apps

A common rule of thumb is to budget 10-20% of the original build cost per year for maintenance, a bit more if small fixes are included, with hosting on top. It's a fine sanity check, but it misses at both ends.

Three worked examples, hosting excluded:

1. An internal tool that cost €12,000 to build. The rule says €1,200-2,400 a year. But quarterly updates, backups and a handful of fixes cost about the same whether the tool cost €12,000 or €35,000, so small apps often land above the rule.
2. A customer portal that cost €50,000. The rule says €5,000-10,000, which falls within the range in the table.
3. A platform that cost €180,000. The rule says €18,000-36,000. That holds too, though fast response times and heavier hosting can push it higher.

Maintenance has a floor. The smallest app still needs patching and backups, and that work doesn't shrink because the build was cheap. Use the percentage to check whether a budget is realistic, then price each line separately when you compare quotes.

What pushes your maintenance bill up or down

Within each size, the same factors decide whether you land at the low or high end:

• How far behind the versions are. An app on supported versions costs what the table says. One that's three major versions behind needs a one-off cleanup before routine maintenance makes sense.
• Automated tests. With good tests, an update can be verified in minutes. Without them, every round means clicking through the app by hand.
• Number of integrations. Each connection to an accounting system, payment provider or other API can change without warning. Budget extra hours for each one.
• Response time. A reply within one business day is a different product from 24/7 on-call cover, and the latter costs considerably more wherever you buy it.
• Personal data and payments. Sensitive data calls for more careful updates, access control and the documentation GDPR expects.
• Hosting choice. Managed hosting costs a little more each month but removes the hours spent patching the operating system.

How maintenance is usually billed

The total depends on how you pay for the hours as well as on how many there are. Three models are common:

• A fixed monthly fee, often called a support retainer. The developer handles updates, monitoring and backups on an agreed schedule. Costs are predictable, but you also pay in quiet months.
• Prepaid hours. You buy a block of hours and draw them down. You only pay for time used, but someone has to remember to request the updates.
• Pay as you go. The cheapest option on paper. The risk is that updates never happen because nobody owns them, and the bill arrives all at once when something breaks.

For most customer-facing apps I recommend a mix: a fixed fee for updates, monitoring and backups, plus a small allowance of hours for fixes. My guide to developer retainer agreements covers how these models work in practice, including what happens to unused hours.

Out-of-hours emergency work is often billed at a premium, so ask before you sign. And have your hosting provider invoice you directly, so subscriptions sit in your company's name and don't leave with the developer if you part ways.

When you don't need a maintenance contract

Maintenance is part of how I make a living, but a contract isn't always the right buy:

• Your site runs on a hosted platform that handles updates for you. Most of the work is already covered by the subscription.
• The app will be retired within six months. Keep backups and apply security patches as needed, and spend the money on whatever replaces it.
• You have developers in-house. Maintenance is part of their job. Just give updates a fixed slot in the plan.
• You need 24/7 on-call cover. I reply within one business day, which suits most B2B systems. If someone has to respond within minutes at 3 a.m., you need a managed service provider with an on-call rota, or your own team.

Look at the overall sums too. If maintaining the app costs more each year than it saves you, check whether an off-the-shelf product could do the same job.

How to build your own maintenance budget

1. Place your app in the table based on who uses it.
2. List the fixed costs. Go through last year's invoices for hosting, domains and tools. You may well find a subscription nobody remembers signing up for.
3. Check the app's condition. Which PHP and framework versions does it run, and when does support end? If it's behind, add a separate line for the cleanup.
4. Set an hours allowance for updates and another for small fixes, and keep both apart from new development.
5. Add a 10-15% buffer for surprises, such as a provider retiring an old API version.
6. Review once a year. Compare budget with actual spend and adjust.

Maintenance isn't the only cost that rarely shows up in a quote. I've listed the rest in my rundown of hidden costs of software development.

Next steps

Find your size in the table and check which versions your app runs on. If it's up to date, you can use the figures directly in your budget. If it's behind, get the cleanup priced first and add routine maintenance on top.

If you'd like help, here's how I handle maintenance and ongoing development of existing web apps. You work directly with me as the developer, you own the code, and you get a reply within one business day.

Frequently asked questions

Is hosting included in a maintenance retainer?+

It depends on the developer, so always ask. Some bundle hosting and maintenance into one monthly fee, others have you pay the hosting provider directly. I recommend the second option, because the account stays in your company's name and you can change developers without moving servers. Whichever model you choose, the agreement should say who pays for servers, backups, domains and monitoring tools.

What happens if I skip maintenance for a year or two?+

You save money now and spend more later. After a couple of years without updates, the app typically runs on versions without security patches, and the next update becomes a project instead of a routine task. Several major versions have to be tackled at once, some packages may be abandoned, and without tests it's hard to know what will break. That usually costs more than the years you skipped.

Is offshore maintenance cheaper?+

The hourly rate usually is, but the total isn't always. A new team needs time to learn your codebase, time zones slow down urgent fixes, and you'll spend more of your own time writing tickets and checking work. It can work well for a well-documented app with good tests and a clear owner on your side. Without those, the savings tend to move into your own hours and into rework.

What does it cost to hand maintenance over to a new developer?+

Expect a one-off onboarding review before routine work starts. The new developer needs access to the code, servers and third-party services, and time to understand the app, its versions and its risks. For a mid-sized web app that's typically anywhere from half a day to a few days of work, depending on documentation and tests. Ask for the review at a fixed price so you know the cost up front.