Why does an app need maintenance if nothing is wrong with it?

Because the platforms move regardless. Apple and Google ship a new operating system version every year and periodically require apps to be built against a newer SDK to stay updatable in the store. An app nobody touches stops being updatable long before it stops working, and the longer the gap, the more expensive the catch-up.

What do Apple and Google charge?

The Apple Developer Program is 99 USD a year, charged in local currency; Apple publishes no fixed sterling price, so the pound figure depends on the exchange rate and VAT. Google Play charges a one-off 25 USD registration fee for the developer account. They are the smallest items on the whole bill.

Running costs

What does it cost to maintain an app per year in the UK?

Q: What does it cost to maintain an app per year?

The rule everyone repeats is 15 to 20 per cent of the build cost a year, so £6,000 to £8,000 on a £40,000 app. That happens to land near the middle of three real tiers: roughly £3,000 to £7,000 a year to keep an app merely publishable, £6,000 to £13,000 to have it maintained with someone answering when it breaks, and £15,000 and up if it is still being improved.

Last updated 7 October 2026

Every page on this subject says the same sentence: budget 15 to 20 per cent of the build cost per year. Not one of them shows where the number comes from, which makes it useless for deciding anything. So here are the actual items.

Four items, and only one of them is a choice

Item	What it costs	Avoidable?
Store fees	Apple 99 USD/year, Google 25 USD once	No
Hosting and backend	A few pounds to a few hundred a month	No, but controllable
Platform upkeep	2–6 developer days a year	No
Fixes and improvements	Whatever you choose to spend	Yes

The first two are small and predictable. The fourth is a decision. The third is the one nobody warns you about, so it goes first.

Platform upkeep: the item that is not optional

Apple and Google each ship a major operating system release every year, and both periodically require that apps be built against a recent SDK to remain updatable in the store. When that deadline arrives somebody has to update the build tooling, fix whatever has been deprecated, test against the new OS versions and ship a release. This happens whether or not you changed a single line of your app.

Two to six developer days a year, depending on how many third-party libraries the app leans on and how long it has been since the last time. The waiting is what costs: an app untouched for two years is not two days from shippable, it is usually two weeks, because every deferred upgrade has to be done at once and they interact.

The three tiers, in pounds

UK contract software developer, median day rate

£525

Six months to 6 October 2026, 257 quoted rates across 441 adverts. Source: ITJobsWatch. Everything below is derived from this figure, so you can redo the arithmetic with your own supplier’s rate.

Tier	What you get	Per year
Keep it publishable	Store fees, hosting, and the platform work needed to stay updatable. No new features, nobody watching.	£3,000–7,000
Maintained	The above plus bug fixes, dependency updates and monitoring. Someone answers when it breaks.	£6,000–13,000
Still being built	The above plus continuous improvement. The app gets better rather than merely surviving.	£15,000 and up

Note where the middle tier lands against a typical £40,000–60,000 build: close to the 15 to 20 per cent everyone quotes. So the rule of thumb is not wrong. It just describes one of three choices and never says which, which is why it is no help when you are budgeting.

What pushes it up

Lots of third-party libraries. Each one is a dependency that can be abandoned by its maintainer. This is the single biggest driver of a maintenance budget and it is decided during the build, not after.
No tests. Without a test suite every change has to be verified by hand, which roughly doubles the time on a routine update.
Two native codebases instead of one. Double the platform work. Sometimes still the right call for other reasons — see the framework page.
Long gaps. The most expensive decision available to you is leaving the app alone for eighteen months and then wanting a change.

And what brings it down

A small fixed rhythm. Half a day a month, where someone updates dependencies and reads the crash log, costs less than two weeks once a year, because the work never piles up. It is also the only arrangement in which you find out about problems before your users do.

Sources. Day rate: ITJobsWatch, UK contract software developer, six months to 6 October 2026. Store fees: Apple Developer Program — 99 USD a year, listed in local currency at enrolment, with no fixed sterling price published; Google Play — 25 USD one-time registration. Both retrieved 7 October 2026. The day counts and the three tiers are my own figures from doing this work, not published averages. The arithmetic is shown so you can substitute your own rate.

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