Software maintenance: what it includes and how often you need it

When a project is delivered, many people assume the work is finished. Software does not work like that: a website or an app in production starts building up risk from the very first month. Software maintenance is what stops that risk from turning into an expensive problem.

What maintenance covers (beyond "keeping it online")

• Dependency updates. Libraries, plugins and SDKs ship new versions with security fixes. Not updating them leaves known, published vulnerabilities in place, with documented exploits that bots probe automatically.
• Verified backups. Scheduling backups is not enough: you have to check every so often that they can actually be restored. A backup that does not restore is not a backup.
• Monitoring. On the web, uptime and performance. In an app, crashes and errors in production. The point is to find out from an alert, not from a customer who could not use it.
• Compatibility. Every new version of Android or iOS can break a feature that used to work fine. So can every change in a third-party API you rely on.
• Ongoing compliance. A form that stops encrypting data, a cookie that loads before consent, or an out-of-date privacy policy are real breaches of the Spanish GDPR and LSSI-CE. The law requires continuous compliance, not a one-off check at launch.
• Small improvements. Depending on the plan, content changes, tweaks and performance improvements applied proactively.

How often you need to step in

There is no magic number, but as a reference:

Task	Rough frequency
Reviewing updates and security	Monthly
Verifying backups	Monthly
Compatibility review (OS, APIs)	Every major release / quarterly
Deeper technical audit	Yearly
Incident response	When it happens, within an agreed response time

What happens without maintenance

The cost of not maintaining is invisible until something goes wrong: the site goes down over a weekend and nobody notices, the app stops receiving approved updates, data leaks, or a legal request arrives. By then, fixing it in a hurry costs a lot more than preventing it with a few hours a month would have.

How many hours a month you need

It depends on how much your software changes and how long you can afford to be without it:

• Stable and unchanging: a minimal plan (a couple of hours a month) so that nobody abandons it.
• Changes with the business: a mid-range plan, with a guaranteed response time and some hours for adjustments.
• Business-critical: a plan with ongoing evolution, priority response and regular check-ins.

You can see how this translates into hours and pricing on the maintenance plans page. And if I did not build your website or app, maintenance always starts with a technical review to establish its real state before taking it on.