Web application maintenance typically costs between $1,500 and $20,000+ per month depending on the application's complexity, traffic volume, compliance requirements, and SLA level. A simple web app with basic maintenance needs costs $1,500-$3,000/month. A mid-complexity app with integrations costs $3,000-$6,000/month. A SaaS platform with multi-tenant architecture costs $5,000-$12,000/month. Enterprise web applications with compliance requirements and high-availability SLAs cost $8,000-$20,000+/month. The industry benchmark is 15-25% of the original development cost per year.

Web application maintenance refers to scheduled, proactive work — security patching, dependency updates, performance optimization, database maintenance, and infrastructure management. Web application support refers to reactive work — responding to bug reports, troubleshooting issues, and resolving incidents as they arise. In practice, an effective web app maintenance and support plan includes both: proactive maintenance to prevent problems and reactive support to fix them when they occur. At Tech Exactly, every maintenance plan includes both components with defined SLAs for support response times.

Outsourcing web application maintenance makes sense when: (1) your development team is focused on new features and doesn't have bandwidth for maintenance, (2) you need specialized skills (DevOps, security, database administration) that your team lacks, (3) you need 24/7 monitoring and support but can't justify a full-time ops team, (4) you've inherited an application from another team and need someone to stabilize it. In-house maintenance makes sense when: you have a large application that justifies a dedicated ops team, or maintenance and new development are deeply intertwined. Many companies use a hybrid model — in-house team for features, outsourced team for infrastructure, security, and monitoring.

Our maintenance process starts with a comprehensive audit of your application — code quality, security, performance, and infrastructure. We then set up monitoring and alerting, address high-priority issues in a stabilization sprint, and move to ongoing monthly maintenance cycles. Each month includes security patching (week 1), bug fixes and performance optimization (week 2), feature updates and UX improvements (week 3), and reporting and planning (week 4). Every client gets a dedicated Slack channel, Jira/Linear board for issue tracking, and monthly status reports covering uptime, performance metrics, bugs fixed, and recommendations.

Our SLA tiers are: Critical issues (application down, data loss) — 1-hour response, 4-hour resolution target. High-priority issues (major feature broken) — 4-hour response, 1 business day resolution. Medium issues (functionality degraded) — 1 business day response, 3 business day resolution. Low issues (minor/cosmetic) — 2 business day response, next sprint resolution. We track and report SLA compliance monthly. All critical and high-priority issues trigger immediate PagerDuty alerts to our on-call engineering team.

Yes. A significant portion of our maintenance clients are companies whose original development team is no longer available — the agency went out of business, the freelancer moved on, or the in-house team was restructured. We start every inherited application with a maintenance audit: reviewing the codebase, documenting the architecture, assessing security and performance, and identifying risks. From there, we create a stabilization plan and ongoing maintenance roadmap. We have experience maintaining applications built with React, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Python/Django, .NET, PHP/Laravel, Ruby on Rails, and legacy jQuery applications.

Every monthly report includes: (1) Uptime percentage and any downtime incidents with root cause analysis, (2) Application performance metrics — average page load time, API response time, error rate trends, (3) Security status — vulnerabilities patched, scan results, compliance status, (4) Maintenance activity log — bugs fixed, features added, patches applied, (5) Hours utilization — how your maintenance hours were spent by category, (6) Recommendations — performance improvement opportunities, security hardening suggestions, modernization candidates, and (7) Plan for next month — prioritized backlog of maintenance items.