App Maintenance Costs in 2025: What It Really Takes to Maintain an App

For most digital products, launch day is just the beginning. Releasing your mobile or web app may feel like crossing the finish line, but it’s more like entering the next race: maintenance.

Today, maintaining an app is no longer a passive activity. From new OS versions and third-party dependency changes to bug fixes and performance monitoring, continuous maintenance is important for keeping your app functional, secure, and competitive. We don’t want to scare you, but the truth is: neglecting it can result in poor app store ratings, broken user flows, or technical debt that blocks adding new functionality.

At Stormotion, we’ve helped fitness, wellness, healthcare, and eMSP companies like ForceUSA, STEPR, Caspar Health, and Milence evolve their apps post-launch through our customized Maintainer Package.

Hear directly from Pauline Gugelot, Product Owner at Milence, in this short video testimonial about her experience working with Stormotion.

Why is this important? Because software isn’t “set it and forget it.” The digital ecosystem is constantly developing. New smartphones and OS updates come out each year, third-party APIs change, user preferences shift, and hackers find new vulnerabilities. Without ongoing support and upgrades, an app quickly becomes outdated or unstable.

Beyond store policies, there’s the user trust factor. Users expect their apps to work flawlessly. Any crash or glitch can hurt your app’s ratings and user retention.

In short, the cost to maintain an app isn’t just a thoughtless spending. It’s an investment in your product’s longevity and reputation.

What Does App Maintenance Include?

App maintenance covers a broad range of activities. From our experience, the components below are the most important.

💡 For a fitness tracking app, Force USA, our team made slight performance improvements that resulted in a higher retention rate.

# 4: Higher App Store Ratings & Visibility

Regular maintenance updates (even if small) signal that the app is actively supported. Frequent updates can boost your app’s ranking in store search results (due to an active update history and active user base).

Plus, users are more likely to download an app if they see it was updated “2 weeks ago” versus one that hasn’t been updated in a year.

# 5: Cost Savings in the Long Run

It might sound counterintuitive that spending on maintenance saves money, but it’s true. Regular maintenance helps catch and fix issues before they escalate into major problems that require expensive re-engineering.

It’s analogous to maintaining a car: routine oil changes prevent engine failures. In software, addressing a bit of tech debt or a minor bug might prevent a complete system outage or emergency overhaul later.

Also, keeping third-party components updated is easier than updating a hundred outdated components all at once after years of neglect.

We always tell our clients that the cost to maintain an app is more predictable than dealing with unpredictable crises.

# 6: Ability to Respond to Market Changes

With an active maintenance and development cycle, you can react promptly to new opportunities or user demands. If a competitor releases a cool feature, you can add something similar or better because your codebase is healthy. If a new device category emerges (say, foldable phones or a new wearable), you can quickly begin a development sprint.

Essentially, maintenance gives you agility. Your Tech Partner is continuously in touch with the code and systems, so scaling the app is much faster than if the app were untouched for ages.

When you don’t track crash logs or regression issues, bugs slip through, ratings suffer, and you lose trust with your users.

💡 Stormotion follows our Development Codex, “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” We focus on clean architecture and thoughtful code because rushing with messy code only leads to slower progress later. Part of the app maintenance fee is improving the codebase for future agility.

# 2: Security Vulnerabilities

Security threats and compliance risks increase every month when your app isn’t patched. Without ongoing care, old encryption or unpatched libraries become an open door for attackers and regulatory trouble.

💡 We know how crucial it is to apply security updates, rotate API keys, and react to new vulnerabilities. During our work with Caspar Health, a digital rehabilitation tracking app, developers changed Sendbird to TalkJS to comply with German privacy and communication policies.

# 3: Incompatibility with New Devices or OS

Neglected apps can’t work on the latest devices or operating systems. Sometimes it’s a user interface issue, sometimes a crash at launch.

💡 Let’s take a look at this example. For fitness BLE-connected apps, like SportPlus, our team keeps up with firmware and OS changes. Otherwise means entire user segments are left abandoned until major fixes are done.

# 4: Inability to Add New Features

Ironically, skipping maintenance often blocks future innovation. The cost and risk of adding new features to an old codebase skyrocket. We’ve seen companies return after a pause, only to face a pile of tech debt so large that they need a full rewrite.

Regular, small improvements (like those bundled into our Maintainer Package) keep your codebase healthy and ready for growth.

💡 For example, after a stair-climber console update for STEPR, we’ve caught a new crash. Corrective maintenance meant quickly diagnosing and patching the issue before users noticed it. As our Development Codex says: “Your best effort means nothing if it doesn’t work.”

Adaptive Maintenance (OS/Device Compatibility)

Adaptive maintenance cost of an app ensures your app stays compatible with new OS versions, device models, third-party APIs, and hardware integrations. It’s especially critical for connected devices and BLE/wearable apps.

💡 For example, we developed the marine battery management app, Norsk Guardian, where firmware and protocol changes require fast adaptation. Without adaptive updates, even well-built apps can quickly become unstable or unusable.

Preventive Maintenance (Avoiding Failures)

Preventive maintenance is about staying ahead of trouble: proactive refactoring, regular code reviews, updating libraries, and strengthening test coverage. Preventive work keeps technical debt in check and avoids “code rot,” so you’re not forced into major, costly overhauls later.

💡 For example, our team refactors APIs for the Milence app to ensure scalability and long-term stability, embodying our “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” philosophy.

Perfective Maintenance (Improvements & UI Updates)

Continuous improvement is the key to user satisfaction. Perfective maintenance means refining features, optimizing UX, and implementing minor enhancements based on feedback. It keeps your app feeling modern, polished, and genuinely helpful to users.

Emergency Maintenance (Critical Fixes)

Even with great planning, surprises happen. Critical bugs or outages may require immediate, unplanned fixes. Emergency maintenance means diagnosing and resolving urgent issues, such as the rapid patch for a payment API disruption in Milence EV charging payment terminals.

💡 Stormotion Codex principle: “Surface knowledge is surface value. Real knowledge means understanding how things actually work and when to use them.” Good architecture now means lower app maintenance costs later.

# 2: Number of Platforms: iOS, Android, Web, Cross-Platform

Supporting multiple platforms (iOS, Android, web) increases maintenance work, since each platform has its own updates and peculiarities.

If you have a cross-platform solution (like in React Native), you maintain one codebase. If you have separate native apps, maintenance time and efforts roughly double for two platforms (but some backend-related tasks are shared). Also consider device types – an app that also runs on tablets, smart TVs, or wearables has a broader surface area to maintain.

💡 If you have a BLE/IoT product, like e-scooter companion app Egret, it requires supporting multiple device types and Bluetooth stacks. As a result, the cost of applications maintenance can be higher.

# 3: Third-Party Services & Integrations

Apps that rely on many third-party services or hardware integrations typically have a bigger maintenance budget. Every integration is a point of potential change. Apps with multiple APIs (maps, social, CRM, etc.) have to monitor all those for changes.

Each external dependency (analytics SDKs, ad networks, payment gateways) adds to the maintenance checklist. But we can advise you on reducing unnecessary dependencies to lower maintenance effort.

💡 Stormotion Software Development Codex: “Keep one eye on today, one on tomorrow.” Anticipate when external services will change and prepare for it.

# 4: Code Quality & Architecture

Based on over 8 years of our experience, this is an often overlooked factor. But software built with modular, well-documented code has lower costs to maintain an app than those with technical debt and spaghetti code.

💡 Stormotion’s approach: As your Tech Partner, we prioritize clean code, documentation, and automated testing from day one. If you decide to maintain the app with an in-house team, you have all the documents and, therefore, spend less time on product support.

# 5: Development Team Size & Location

Who is handling your maintenance? An in-house developer vs. an outsourced experienced mobile team has different effectiveness.

If your team is not very experienced with the app’s tech stack, it might take longer to troubleshoot issues. Moreover, they may have other unrelated tasks, and maintenance time can be cut to complete more critical tasks.

Using the services of a dedicated Tech Partner can lower the cost of maintaining an application because they’ve built your product or solved similar maintenance challenges across other projects.

💡 For example, Stormotion’s team has expertise in BLE & connectivity apps, and we can quickly diagnose issues in such apps that others might spend weeks on.

Many companies opt for a maintenance contract (retainer) with a Tech Partner like Stormotion for proactive support, which ensures a certain number of hours are dedicated monthly to maintenance tasks.

# 6: Backend Infrastructure & Server Load

The cost to maintain an application isn’t purely developer hours.

Cloud servers, databases, CDNs, and third-party SaaS (like push notification services, crash reporting tools, etc.) all have fees. A high-traffic app will spend more on servers and bandwidth, which is part of the maintenance cost.

Keep in mind: hosting charges, API call costs (if you pay per use for some APIs), and licenses (like Apple Developer Program $99/year, or any premium SDKs) factor into the maintenance budget.

Tip: Regularly review and right-size your infrastructure to avoid “quiet” cost bloat. For example, we’ve helped clients cut AWS bills by 15–25% just by optimizing usage.

To illustrate, imagine two scenarios:

• App A: Simple, well-built calorie tracker. Only needs updates for major OS changes. Minimal maintenance – often just a few hours monthly.
• App B: Complex kiosk app (payment, hardware integration, compliance). Needs frequent updates, scaling, and 24/7 support – the cost of application maintenance can be thousands per month.

Most apps fall somewhere in between. During the planning stage of your app (or at least post-MVP), your Tech Partner should analyze these factors and get an estimate for maintenance needs.

Pro tip: Don’t make the mistake of budgeting 100% for development and 0% for maintenance. How much does it cost to maintain an application? From our 8+ years of experience in app development, the estimated annual maintenance is at ~33% of the initial development cost. But your real budget may vary based on the factors above.

Hosting & Infrastructure

This includes your server hosting, databases, cloud storage, content delivery network (CDN), and any backend services. Depending on your service provider (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.), this can be a fixed monthly fee or usage-based. For a moderately used app, hosting might be in the range of $70 to $300 per month, but high-scale apps can spend far more.

Also include any third-party cloud services (e.g., Algolia for search, streaming services, etc.) in the app maintenance cost. These are fixed/recurring costs that you pay to keep the app running 24/7.

Why it matters: Without this, your app simply wouldn’t run. Optimizing hosting can save substantial recurring costs.

Developer Maintenance Hours

Time spent by developers to keep your app stable, secure, and compatible.

This could be on a retainer (e.g., 40 hours/month at a fixed rate) or ad hoc hourly. Some companies treat this as a percentage of a developer’s time (e.g., one developer dedicating 20% of their time to maintenance).

If outsourced, you might have a monthly app maintenance fee – for instance, Stormotion’s Basic Maintainer Package offers 40 hours/month, and Advanced 80 hours/month, covering proactive maintenance tasks.

Stormotion’s typical scope includes:

1. Crash monitoring: Detect and resolve crashes before they impact many users.
2. Performance issue monitoring & fixes: Identify and fix slow load times or memory issues.
3. Manual regression testing: Ensure new changes don’t break existing features.
4. Reducing technical debt: Clean up outdated code to make future updates faster and safer.
5. Planned app adaptation for hardware manufacturer/partner changes: Update BLE characteristics or firmware compatibility to ensure seamless integration.
6. Planned adaptation for API & third-party updates: Adjust integrations when providers change endpoints or authentication.

Below is a breakdown of how our 40h/month Maintainer scope typically distributes across the most common maintenance tasks. Actual time may shift monthly depending on priority and issues encountered.

Licenses & Subscriptions

These are yearly or monthly fees for tools and services used in your app. If you use any paid SDKs or services, for instance, a mapping API might charge after a certain free quota, or a push notifications service might have a fee for high volume.

Another common one is crash reporting or analytics beyond the free tier (e.g., Firebase Crashlytics is free up to a point, but others like Sentry might charge for more team members or data retention).

Payment gateways often take a transaction cut rather than a fee, but if you have a subscription to something like Stripe Radar (fraud prevention) or advanced Firebase features, count those. These are usually not huge individually (maybe $50 – $200/month spread across tools), but they add up to the cost of maintaining an app.

Why it matters: Even small recurring fees add up. Tracking them prevents budget overspending.

Tools and Metrics for Budget Planning

Tools to support accurate forecasting of application maintenance cost:

• Cost tracking: Harvest, Clockify;
• Monitoring: Firebase Crashlytics, Sentry, New Relic;
• Performance metrics: Lighthouse, WebPageTest, custom analytics dashboards;
• Task estimation: Jira + Planning Poker, Notion roadmaps, and ClickUp estimates.

Key metrics to track:

• Crash-free sessions %;
• Average response time (API/backend);
• Monthly active users vs. support ticket count;
• Library/API update frequency;
• Average QA hours per release.

All these can influence your ongoing effort and help course-correct your budget over time.

Typical Maintenance Budget for 2025

Based on recent trends and our experience with clients across Health, Fitness, and Mobility domains, here’s a rough snapshot of how much it cost to maintain an app in 2025:

Why it works:

• Shared logic and components reduce duplicate work.
• Bug fixes are done once, not twice.
• One QA cycle instead of two.

💡 Stormotion use case: We often build connected fitness and IoT apps with React Native, so teams can iterate faster across platforms while cutting maintenance costs by up to 30%.

📌 Not sure which to pick? Here's our full comparison of the Flutter and React Native difference. If you're considering this stack, here are some of our go-to React Native development tools.

Automate Monitoring and Deployment

A modern CI/CD pipeline and proactive monitoring setup can significantly reduce manual maintenance effort. Less firefighting = fewer expensive developer hours wasted.

Why it works:

• Automated tests catch regressions early.
• Crash reports & performance alerts help fix issues before users complain.
• Automated builds & deploys reduce human error and release effort.

💡 Tools we recommend: GitHub Actions, Bitrise, Fastlane for CI/CD; Firebase Crashlytics, Sentry, or Datadog for monitoring.

Avoid Over-Engineering

Unnecessary abstractions or edge-case features can increase the long-term costs to maintain an app. Stick to proven patterns and favor clarity over cleverness.

Why it works:

• Simpler architecture = easier to debug, update, and onboard new devs.
• Cleaner code = faster fixes and fewer bugs.
• Easier to test and optimize.

💡 Tip: Regularly audit your codebase to remove unused or overly complex modules.

Work With an Experienced Development Partner

Experienced teams don’t just build your app; they build it with maintainability in mind. From choosing stable libraries to structuring the architecture, they help prevent problems before they arise.

Why it works to outsource mobile app development:

• Saves time through standard workflows and automation setups.
• Avoids tech debt thanks to industry best practices.
• Spot-on decisions for scalable infrastructure and third-party tools.

💡 At Stormotion, we apply these principles in every project, from building BLE-powered fitness apps to kiosk apps or complex HealthTech platforms. We also offer customized Maintainer Packages for predictable monthly support.

If your app involves connectivity, compliance, or high user expectations, there’s a chance we’ve already tackled similar challenges.

Maintainer Package

Our clients don’t scramble for ad-hoc fixes. They get quick technical support through our Stormotion Maintainer Package:

• Proactive Monitoring (e.g. Crashlytics, Sentry);
• Monthly Testing & Updates (planned OS, SDK, and library updates);
• Quick Bug Fixes (with severity-based prioritization);
• Tech Debt & Preventive Tasks (not just firefighting);
• Flexible Plans: Choose between Basic (40h) and Advanced (80h) depending on your app’s complexity and release rhythm.

It’s not just support; it’s a roadmap to keep your app healthy, fast, and evolving.

Maintainable by Design

Our Development Codex is built around maintainability:

• No over-engineering. Clean, scalable architecture.
• Tested in production environments.
• Our code reviews and documentation practices make sure maintenance can be picked up by any developer on our team without delays.

Full-Stack Capabilities

Stormotion isn’t a one-role agency. We bring designers, mobile/web/backend developers, QA, and DevOps into the maintenance cycle. That means:

• UI improvements? ✅
• Server-side issue? ✅
• New SDK version broke your feature? ✅
• Need analytics or rollout tooling? ✅

You won’t need to find 3 different vendors since we handle all in-house.

Transparent and Collaborative

We treat you like a long-term partner.

• We align with your team’s roadmap and sprint cycles;
• Share monthly reports and recommendations;
• Don’t have hidden or unclear app maintenance costs;
• Keep you informed of issues, improvements, and upgrade needs;
• Suggest preventive actions instead of just reacting.