How Do I Budget for App Updates After Launch?

An education startup launched their learning app in September with a £45,000 budget, then watched their bank account drain by another £8,000 before Christmas on updates they never saw coming. The headteacher integration broke after an iOS update, push notifications stopped working for Android users running version 12, and parents kept requesting features that seemed simple but required serious development time. This pattern repeats itself across every app we build, and the businesses that survive are the ones who planned for it from day one.

Most app projects allocate 80% of their budget to launch and nothing to the three years that follow

The conversation about post-launch costs needs to happen before you write a single line of code, not when your app starts showing cracks three months after release. After building apps for a decade, I can tell you that the maintenance budget matters more than almost any other financial decision you'll make about your mobile product, and yet it's the one area where businesses consistently underprepare or ignore completely until problems force their hand.

What Updates Actually Cost (And Why Everyone Gets This Wrong)

The numbers people throw around about maintenance costs are often wildly disconnected from what actually happens once your app goes live. I've watched clients budget £500 monthly for updates on apps that need £2,000 worth of work just to keep pace with operating system changes, let alone add the features users are requesting or fix the bugs that emerge through real-world usage patterns.

Bug fixes eat up time differently depending on their complexity. A simple UI glitch might take two hours to identify and resolve, costing you £150 to £200 in developer time. Something deeper in your backend logic could require eight hours of investigation and testing, pushing that single fix to £800 or more. Security patches demand immediate attention and can't be postponed, which means they'll pull resources from whatever else you had planned.

Platform updates from Apple and Google arrive on their schedule, not yours. When iOS 17 changed how notifications work, every app using the old system needed updates or risk broken functionality. That's not optional work you can delay until next quarter, it's maintenance that protects the investment you've already made.

Third-party services change their APIs without asking your permission. Payment processors, mapping services, analytics tools... they all update their systems and give you a deadline to comply. Miss that deadline and parts of your app simply stop working. A fintech app we maintain had to update their Stripe integration twice in eighteen months, each time requiring testing across both platforms to ensure payment flows still worked correctly.

Setting Your Monthly Maintenance Budget

The baseline maintenance budget needs to cover three things before you even think about new features: server costs, basic monitoring, and reactive bug fixes. For a typical small business app serving a few thousand users, that floor sits around £1,200 to £1,800 monthly. Server hosting runs £200 to £400 depending on your traffic and data storage needs, monitoring tools and crash reporting services add another £100 to £200, and you need at least eight to twelve developer hours monthly just to handle the issues that will inevitably surface.

Your user base size changes the maths. An app with 50,000 active users generates more support tickets, more edge cases, and more load on your infrastructure than one with 5,000 users. The bug that affects one in every thousand users isn't worth fixing when you have 2,000 downloads, but it becomes a daily problem when you're at 100,000 installs.

Set your maintenance budget as a fixed monthly retainer with your development team rather than paying hourly rates for each issue. This gives you predictable costs and means developers can act quickly when problems emerge without waiting for budget approval.

Feature development sits separate from maintenance, and this is where businesses often muddy the waters. Maintenance keeps your existing app working. Features add new capability. A healthcare app we support spends £1,500 monthly on pure maintenance, then allocates another £5,000 quarterly for planned feature releases. That separation means they can predict costs accurately and choose when to invest in growth versus stability. Understanding how to scope features appropriately from launch helps prevent scope creep during the maintenance phase.

• Months 1-3 post-launch: £2k-3k monthly (high bug discovery period)
• Months 4-12: £1.2k-2k monthly (stabilisation phase)
• Year 2 onwards: £1k-1.5k monthly baseline (mature product maintenance)
• Quarterly feature budget: £3k-8k per release

Planning for Feature Updates vs Bug Fixes

The line between a bug fix and a feature request gets blurry fast, and how you categorise work determines whether it comes from your maintenance budget or your development fund. When users complain that your e-commerce app doesn't save their basket between sessions, is that a bug or a missing feature? The answer changes the cost model completely.

Bugs break existing functionality that used to work or was promised to work. If your login flow fails for users with email addresses longer than thirty characters, that's a bug. If users want fingerprint authentication but you only built password login, that's a feature. The distinction matters because bugs need fixing immediately while features get prioritised against business value and available budget.

I've seen teams get stuck in endless cycles of "urgent" updates because they never clearly defined what constitutes a bug versus an enhancement. A retail client kept pulling developers off planned work to handle what the product manager called critical issues, but half of them turned out to be feature requests dressed up as problems. Setting clear definitions stops this drift and keeps your budgets in their proper lanes. Learning how to evaluate user feature requests properly prevents scope creep and helps maintain budget discipline.

Your product roadmap should separate reactive work from proactive improvements. Maintenance budgets handle reactive problems, keeping the lights on and the app functional. Development budgets fund proactive additions that drive business goals forward. When you mix these two, you end up with neither enough money to maintain quality nor enough to build the features that would actually grow your business. Understanding how to decline feature requests diplomatically helps maintain this separation while preserving user relationships.

The 15-20% Rule and When It Breaks Down

The industry standard says to budget fifteen to twenty percent of your initial development cost annually for maintenance, and for many apps that number holds reasonably well. Build a £60,000 app and plan for £9,000 to £12,000 yearly to keep it running properly. That covers most of what we discussed earlier... platform updates, bug fixes, minor improvements, and the ongoing costs of keeping your app available and functional.

The 15% rule assumes your app stays roughly the same size and complexity it launched with

The rule falls apart when your app grows. Adding features increases the surface area for bugs, creates more dependencies to maintain, and expands the testing matrix every time you need to update something. An education app we built launched with four main features and required about £12,000 yearly in maintenance. Three years and eight major features later, that same app now costs £28,000 annually to maintain properly, despite the original build being only £75,000.

Apps with complex integrations blow past the twenty percent mark routinely. When you're connecting to payment processors, booking systems, CRM platforms, and third-party APIs, you're dependent on services you don't control. Each integration point is another thing that can break and require updates when external providers change their systems. A property app connecting to three different listing services spends nearly thirty percent of their original build cost yearly just keeping those integrations working.

Your feature velocity changes the maths too. The 15-20% rule works if you're mainly maintaining what exists, but many businesses want to keep adding capability to their app quarterly or even monthly. That's not maintenance anymore, that's ongoing development, and it requires a completely different budget model that treats your app as a living product rather than a finished project. Considering whether to build competitive features or focus on differentiation affects these ongoing costs significantly.

Building a Reserve Fund for Emergency Updates

Emergency updates arrive without warning and demand immediate attention regardless of your planned budget or roadmap. Security vulnerabilities get discovered, Apple rejects your update for a policy violation you need to fix within days, or a critical bug makes it through testing and affects paying customers. These situations require developers to drop everything and fix the problem now, not next month when you've got budget available.

The reserve fund sits separate from your monthly maintenance budget and acts as insurance against the unexpected. For apps handling payments or personal data, I recommend keeping three to six months of maintenance budget in reserve. That's £3,600 to £7,200 for an app with a £1,200 monthly maintenance allocation. It sounds like a lot sitting unused, but the first time you need emergency work on a weekend to fix a checkout bug during your busy season, you'll understand why it exists.

• Security vulnerability fixes: £1.5k-5k depending on severity
• Emergency platform compatibility: £2k-6k when OS updates break things
• Critical bug fixes affecting revenue: £800-3k for fast turnaround
• Compliance updates with short deadlines: £2k-8k for legal requirements

Some emergencies cost more than others. A data breach or security issue could require £10,000 or more to properly investigate, patch, notify users, and implement better safeguards. A healthcare app we support discovered a vulnerability in how they stored appointment data and needed £14,000 worth of emergency work to fix the problem, conduct a security audit, and implement the recommendations. Their reserve fund covered it without derailing other projects. When your app requires additional funding for these emergencies, understanding different funding options available can help you secure emergency capital quickly.

Replenishing the reserve matters just as much as building it. After you tap the fund for an emergency, add a line item to your next few months' budgets to rebuild it back to the target level. Treat it like any other business insurance... you hope you never need it, but when you do, having it available makes the difference between a manageable crisis and a catastrophic failure.

iOS and Android Update Cycles (What They Mean for Your Budget)

Apple and Google release major operating system updates on reasonably predictable schedules, and each one requires you to test your app and potentially make changes to stay compatible. iOS updates arrive in September, giving you about three months' notice from the beta release to prepare. Android updates roll out more slowly across different device manufacturers, which gives you more time but also means you're supporting more OS versions simultaneously.

Testing alone takes time even when nothing breaks. You need to run through all critical user journeys on the new OS version, check that UI elements display correctly, verify push notifications still work, and test any features that interact with system-level capabilities like the camera or location services. For a moderately complex app, budget eight to sixteen hours of testing time per platform update, which translates to £600 to £1,200 in developer time. Understanding proper testing methodologies for new technology features helps ensure your updates don't break existing functionality.

Schedule your platform compatibility testing in August for iOS and October for Android. This timing lets you use the public betas to identify issues before the updates reach most of your users, and ensures you've got updates ready to submit when the new OS versions go live.

Breaking changes demand real development work beyond testing. Sometimes Apple or Google deprecates an API you were using, changes how permissions work, or updates their app review guidelines in ways that affect your app. An e-commerce client had to rebuild their entire photo upload flow when iOS changed how apps access the camera roll, costing them £4,200 to implement the new system and test it thoroughly. When communicating these necessary updates to users, knowing how to write effective release notes helps maintain user confidence during the transition.

Supporting older OS versions costs money too. Every version you support multiplies your testing time and increases the complexity of your codebase. We usually recommend supporting the current OS version plus two years back, which covers about ninety-five percent of active users while keeping testing manageable. Going beyond that means maintaining compatibility with systems that lack modern features and have declining user bases.

Tracking Your Update Spending Against User Value

The money you spend on updates should connect to the value your app delivers, not just to keeping it functional. I've watched businesses pour thousands into maintenance for apps that weren't generating revenue or achieving their business goals, when that money could have been better spent elsewhere or the app should have been retired completely.

Start by knowing your key metrics. How many active users do you have monthly? What's your retention rate? If you're monetising directly, what's your average revenue per user? For apps supporting business operations, what's the time saved or efficiency gained? These numbers tell you whether your maintenance investment makes sense or whether you're propping up something that isn't delivering value. Understanding how to demonstrate app profitability helps frame these spending decisions in business terms.

A simple calculation helps frame this decision. If you're spending £18,000 yearly on maintenance for an app with 5,000 active users, that's £3.60 per user annually. If each user generates £20 in revenue or saves your business £50 in operational costs, that's a solid investment. If they're generating £2 in value, you've got a problem that more updates won't solve.

The metrics shift based on your app type. E-commerce apps track average order value and purchase frequency. Healthcare apps measure appointment bookings and patient engagement. Internal business apps look at time saved per transaction or error reduction rates. Whatever your app does, tie update spending to outcomes that matter to your business rather than just keeping the app alive for its own sake.

Sometimes the right decision is to stop investing. We've had conversations with clients where the maths clearly showed their app wasn't worth maintaining anymore. User numbers were declining, engagement was low, and the cost to fix mounting technical debt exceeded what it would take to build something new with current requirements. Knowing when to walk away saves money in the long run. If you find yourself in this position, considering whether debt or equity financing makes sense for rebuilding versus continuing maintenance can help guide your decision.

Making Post-Launch Costs Predictable

The businesses that handle app maintenance best are the ones who treat it as an operating expense from day one, not a surprise that emerges three months after launch. Your monthly maintenance budget should sit in your P&L alongside other recurring costs like hosting, software subscriptions, and support staff. It's not optional spending you can skip when cash gets tight, it's the cost of keeping a business asset functional and valuable.

Build your budget model in layers. Start with baseline maintenance covering servers, monitoring, and reactive bug fixes. Add a quarterly allocation for planned feature work. Keep your reserve fund for emergencies. This structure gives you flexibility to adjust feature spending based on business performance while protecting the baseline health of your app regardless of what else is happening in your company. When presenting this budget structure to stakeholders or investors, knowing how to make your app more attractive to funders can help secure ongoing support for maintenance costs.

The apps that succeed long-term are the ones with proper financial planning behind them. They don't treat launch as the finish line, they understand it's the starting point for years of ongoing investment and improvement. Your app will need updates next month, next quarter, and next year. The question isn't whether you'll spend money on maintenance, it's whether you'll plan for it properly or scramble to find budget every time something needs attention.

If you're planning an app project and want to talk through the real costs of building and maintaining it properly, get in touch with us and we'll walk you through what to expect based on your specific requirements.

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