There is a specific feeling we get when we hand over a software project to a client. It’s a mix of pride, relief, and excitement. The buttons click, the data flows, and the UI is pixel-perfect. In that moment, the application is a shiny, well-oiled machine.
Naturally, the instinct for many stakeholders is to high-five the team, pop the champagne, and immediately lock the budget box. The thinking goes: “The software is done. It works. Why would we keep spending money on it?”
It’s a valid question. On a balance sheet, maintenance looks like a line item with zero ROI. Why pay for an oil change when the car is brand new and driving perfectly? But from where we sit—the vendor side of the table—we see a very different, and much more expensive, reality.
The Mirage of Savings
We understand the temptation. You have a limited budget, and you want to spend it on new features, new value, and new growth. Allocating funds to update a library that your users will never see or care about feels like throwing money into a void.
In the short term, deprioritizing maintenance works. The app will keep running. The users will stay happy. You might even feel like a financial genius for cutting those “unnecessary” retainer costs.
But software is not a statue; it is a living organism existing in a constantly changing ecosystem. Third-party APIs change, security standards evolve, and mobile operating systems release updates that break older code.
The Compound Interest of Neglect
Consider the following scenario:
A client returns to us two years after launch. They haven’t done any maintenance, but now they want to add a small, simple feature. In a maintained project, this might take ten hours of development.
But because the project has sat dormant, the “simple” feature is impossible to implement immediately. The framework is three versions behind. The dependencies are deprecated. The build pipeline is broken because the cloud provider changed their configuration.
Suddenly, that “low value” maintenance you skipped has compounded. We aren’t just building a feature anymore; we are performing an archaeological dig just to get the project to build. What should have been a small invoice becomes a massive remediation project, costing five to ten times more than the original maintenance would have.
Future-Proofing Your Investment
We don’t say this to scare you (well, maybe a little), but to help you protect your investment.
When we build software, we want it to last. We want your application to be as performant in year three as it was on day one. But that longevity requires a shift in perspective. Maintenance isn’t a “nice-to-have” add-on; it is an insurance policy against catastrophic technical debt.
So, when you are planning your next software project, factor the maintenance into the budget from the start. It might seem boring now, but trust us—it is much cheaper than the alternative.
