Software Maintenance Costs: Transparent Monthly Estimates

Monthly software maintenance costs are typically 10–20% of the original development costs per year. For a EUR 35,000 application, that is approximately EUR 280 – 560/month excl. VAT. Small applications start from €200/month excl. VAT.

The most important factors are: application size, code complexity, technologies used, desired SLA level, and whether the software is well documented.

Depending on SLA level: monitoring, bug fixes, security updates, performance optimization, dependency updates, backup monitoring, support availability, and potentially small enhancements.

Basic: Normal response time (48h), regular business hours. Standard: Faster response (24h), extended hours. Premium: Guaranteed response times (4h), 24/7 availability for critical systems.

Yes, we also take over maintenance of software developed by others. This requires an initial code analysis (from EUR 1,400 excl. VAT) to assess maintainability and estimate the effort.

For business-critical software: yes. Without maintenance, dependencies become outdated, security vulnerabilities arise, and bugs go unfixed. The cost of retroactive repair is usually significantly higher than continuous maintenance.

Without maintenance, technical debt accumulates: outdated dependencies lead to security vulnerabilities, bugs remain undetected, performance deteriorates. The cost of later remediation usually exceeds maintenance costs many times over.

For our own software, immediately. For takeovers: after 1–2 weeks of code analysis.

Yes, that is our day-to-day work. We start with a code analysis: quality, dependencies, documentation. From that we create a realistic offer for ongoing maintenance. No takeover without a prior risk assessment.

Source code access, deployment documentation, infrastructure credentials and a technical kick-off call. The better the handover documentation, the faster and more cost-effective the onboarding.

For existing customers with SLA: response time under 4 hours, initial measures within one business day. For new customers without SLA: assessment within 24 hours. Emergency hotline for production outages on request.