# App maintenance cost: what it really costs to run an app

Source: https://www.plutonapps.com/resources/app-maintenance-cost

Published 2026-10-02. By Plutonapps Engineering.

The build is a one-off. Running, fixing and securing the app is a monthly bill. Here is every line item, priced from published sources, and how to estimate your own year.

As of 2 October 2026, running an AI-built web app costs two very different amounts. The services it runs on are priced in tens of dollars a month to start, and grow with users and add-ons: Supabase Pro starts at $25 a month and Sentry's Team plan at $26 a month billed yearly. The people who fix, update and secure it cost far more: a US software developer earns a median $135,980 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For most products, engineering is the real maintenance cost, and it depends on how often the app changes, not on what the build cost.

This guide breaks the yearly bill into line items, prices the ways to pay for the engineering, and shows how to estimate your own. Every outside figure is dated and sourced at the end.

## How much does app maintenance cost per year?

Add up three things: infrastructure, third-party services and engineering time. The first two show up on invoices and are easy to read. The third is the one founders leave out, because nothing bills for it until something breaks.

A prototype can run its infrastructure on free or entry plans. Once it has paying users, it needs paid plans with backups and monitoring, which start at tens of dollars a month per service. Engineering has a floor even in quiet months, for security updates and fixes, and grows with every feature you add. If you keep shipping, budget for steady engineering capacity, not an occasional repair.

## Why does the "percent of build cost" rule break for AI-built apps?

Many agency guides say maintenance costs a fixed share of the original build each year. We could not find a primary source for that rule, so we do not use it. It also fails on its own terms for AI-built apps.

If you built your first version in Lovable or another AI app builder, the build may have cost little more than a builder subscription and some credits. A percentage of that number tells you nothing. The work after launch is the same as for any other app: patching dependencies, fixing bugs real users find, keeping access rules correct, and shipping the next feature without breaking the last one. AI-built code can need more of this work, not less, when nobody reviewed it line by line as it was written. That unreviewed work is [technical debt](https://www.plutonapps.com/resources/what-is-technical-debt), and you pay it down after launch.

For what the first version costs, see our guide to the [cost to build an app](https://www.plutonapps.com/resources/cost-to-build-an-app). This guide starts where that one stops.

## What are the line items in an app maintenance budget?

The table lists the usual monthly costs for a web app built on Supabase, with the published price where a provider states one. Your providers may differ; the categories will not.

| Line item | What it covers | Published price, as of 2 Oct 2026 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Database, auth and storage (Supabase) | Data, sign-in, files, backups | Free plan, paused after 1 week of inactivity; Pro from $25 a month with $10 of compute credits |
| Growth on that database | More users, data and traffic | Pro includes 100,000 monthly active users, then $0.00325 each; 250 GB of egress, then $0.09 per GB; 8 GB of disk, then $0.125 per GB |
| Backups you can restore to a moment | Point-in-time recovery | $100 a month per 7 days of history on Supabase; daily backups kept 7 days on Pro |
| Error monitoring (Sentry) | Alerts when users hit errors | Developer plan $0 for 5,000 errors; Team $26 a month billed yearly for 50,000 |
| Builder hosting (Lovable Cloud) | Hosting and backend run by Lovable | Billed from your credits, after any monthly Cloud grant in your plan; top-ups are $15 per 50 credits on Pro. Backend services pause shortly after credits run out |
| App store membership | Only if you ship an app on Apple's App Store | Apple Developer Program, $99 a year |
| Third-party APIs | Payments, email, AI models, maps, SMS | Per use; set limits, because AI calls can spike |
| Engineering | Fixes, updates, security, releases, features | See the next section |

Two rows deserve a second look. Free plans are fine for a prototype, but a paused database is an outage for real users. And when a builder's credits run out, Lovable's documentation says the built-in backend pauses: the data stays safe, but nobody can reach or export it until the services run again. Credits are a running cost, not just a build cost.

## What engineering work does maintenance include?

Engineering is the largest line because software does not stand still, even when you do. This is the work that keeps an app running:

- Dependency and runtime upgrades. Node.js says a long-term support release typically gets critical fixes for 30 months in total, and that production apps should only use releases still in active or maintenance support. As of 2 October 2026, Node.js lists version 20 as end of life, so apps still on it run without those fixes.
- Security patches. Tools such as GitHub's Dependabot open pull requests to update vulnerable packages. Someone still has to review each one and run the tests, because an update can break working code.
- Bug fixes. Real users find paths nobody tested. Each fix needs a test so it stays fixed.
- Monitoring and incidents. Someone has to watch errors and uptime and act when they move. Our glossary entry on [observability](https://www.plutonapps.com/resources/what-is-observability) explains what to watch.
- Access rules. Every new table or feature must keep users out of each other's data.
- New features. Most products keep changing after launch. Every change has to ship without breaking what already works.

The first four are the floor: they cost money even if you never add a feature. The last two are where most of the hours go in a product that is still growing.

## Who should maintain your app, and what does each option cost?

You can pay for engineering by the hour, by salary, or by the month. The table compares the options using published figures.

| Option | Published cost, as of 2 Oct 2026 | What to check |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Freelancer or firm, by the hour | Freelance rates vary by person. Most software firms on Clutch charge $24 to $49 an hour; US firms $50 to $99 (Clutch, updated 21 Sep 2026) | Who answers when production breaks, and how fast |
| In-house developer (US) | Median pay $135,980 a year (BLS, May 2025), before benefits and recruiting | Cover for holidays and the skills one person does not have |
| Agency retainer | Quoted by each agency; we found no independent published figure for retainers | Whether the retainer covers releases, monitoring and on-call, or hours only |
| Development subscription (Plutonapps Starter) | $2,999 a month paid annually, or $3,999 month to month; Growth is custom | What is included, and the fair-use limits |

Hourly work suits a stable app that rarely changes. A hire suits a product big enough to keep one person busy and a founder ready to manage them. Our [in-house developer vs subscription comparison](https://www.plutonapps.com/compare/in-house-developer-vs-subscription) prices a hire in full, and the [development subscription vs agency comparison](https://www.plutonapps.com/compare/development-subscription-vs-agency) covers retainers.

A [development subscription](https://www.plutonapps.com/resources/what-is-a-development-subscription) is a flat monthly fee for a team. On our Starter plan that covers unlimited changes within fair use and available engineering capacity, code review by a second engineer, regression and security checks on every change, two production releases a week, standard monitoring, and emergency production support up to five times a month. Third-party infrastructure you own is billed to you at cost.

## What happens if you skip maintenance?

An app nobody maintains does not stay the same. It gets worse while the world around it changes.

- Runtimes reach end of life. Once a release stops getting fixes, every new vulnerability in it stays open.
- Vulnerable packages pile up. Each skipped update makes the next one bigger and riskier to apply.
- Services pause or change. A free database pauses after a week without activity; a builder's backend pauses when credits run out.
- Errors go unseen. Without monitoring, users find the outage before you do.
- Changes get slower. When nobody knows the code, every new feature starts with relearning it.

The cost of skipping is real, but it arrives late and all at once. Steady maintenance spreads the same work across the year.

## How do you estimate the maintenance cost of your own app?

1. **List every service the app uses** Open your hosting, database, email, payments and AI accounts. Write down each plan and its monthly price today.
2. **Price the next twelve months of growth** Use each provider's published overage prices for users, data and traffic. Add backups and monitoring if you do not pay for them yet.
3. **Set limits on per-use services** Put spending caps on AI and messaging providers, so one bad day cannot become one bad month.
4. **Estimate the engineering floor** Count upgrades, security patches, bug fixes and monitoring as a monthly minimum, even in months with no new features.
5. **Add your roadmap and choose who does it** Add the features you plan to ship, then compare an hourly, salaried or monthly option against that total.

To see how close your app is to safe to maintain, take the free [production-readiness check](https://www.plutonapps.com/tools/production-readiness-check): 19 questions, a score out of 100 and the three risks to fix first.

## What makes a real product cheaper to maintain?

Tests. Looph, customer-feedback software shaped in Lovable, was engineered on our Starter plan in 28 working days and now runs in production with row-level security on all 172 database tables. Its passing tests went from 1,152 at handover to 10,387 in CI, and a quality check that gets worse fails the build. That is what keeps maintenance predictable: every update and fix runs against the same tests before it ships.

> **One flat figure for running and improving your product** On a Plutonapps plan you keep prompting in Lovable, and our engineers turn each version into the live product. Every change is reviewed, tested and security-checked, and we watch production around the clock.

Plans start at $2,999 a month paid annually, or $3,999 month to month; Growth is custom. See [pricing](https://www.plutonapps.com/pricing).

## Sources

Each outside figure above comes from one of these pages, checked on 2 October 2026.

- Supabase: Pricing (supabase.com/pricing).
- Sentry: Pricing (sentry.io/pricing).
- Lovable documentation: Plans and credits (docs.lovable.dev/introduction/plans-and-credits).
- Apple: Apple Developer Program enrollment (developer.apple.com/programs/enroll).
- Node.js: Previous releases and release schedule (nodejs.org/en/about/previous-releases).
- GitHub documentation: About Dependabot security updates (docs.github.com).
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics: Occupational Outlook Handbook, Software Developers, median pay May 2025 (bls.gov).
- Clutch: Software development pricing guide, updated 21 Sep 2026 (clutch.co/developers/pricing).
- Plutonapps: our pricing page and our Looph case study, as published on this site.

## Frequently asked questions

### How much does it cost to maintain an app per month?

Infrastructure for a small web app can start at $0 on free plans, and paid entry plans such as Supabase Pro start at $25 a month as of October 2026. Engineering is usually the larger cost and depends on how often the app changes.

### Is app maintenance a percentage of the build cost?

That rule of thumb is common but we found no primary source for it. It also fails for AI-built apps, whose first version can cost very little while the work after launch is the same as for any other app.

### What is included in app maintenance?

Hosting and database plans, backups, monitoring, third-party services, dependency and runtime upgrades, security patches, bug fixes, incident response and, for most products, new features.

### What happens if I stop maintaining my app?

Runtimes and packages fall out of support and stop getting security fixes, free plans can pause, errors go unnoticed, and each later update becomes bigger and riskier to apply.

### How much does Plutonapps cost for maintenance?

The Starter plan costs $2,999 a month paid annually or $3,999 month to month, for products with up to 25,000 users. Growth is custom-priced. Third-party infrastructure you own is billed to you at cost.