"I had an app built a few months/years ago by a consultant or former employee, but now I need to update it and generally maintain it. I'm not really sure where to start. I can't find someone to do this... and I really need someone to help me."
Barry, Owner, Senior Consultant
Barry has over 5 years of experience developing native mobile apps for clients, line-of-busniess mobile apps for fortune 500 companies, and original apps for the Apple App Store.
This is a fairly common complaint. A lot of freelancers like greenfield development and can't really stand the maintenance side of things. Its unglamorous and generally undervalued as a service. That means there are lots of companies who have to pick up the pieces and either train internal staff, abandon the project, or pay large consultancies a hefty sum to bring their apps up to modern standards and handle ongoing maintenance.
Generally the kinds of things that go into the long-term care and feeding of apps is:
- Updating certificates (push notifications and provisioning profiles)
- Migrating to the latest iOS SDK version
- Refactoring deprecated code
- Ongoing bugfixes and error monitoring
- Data model migrations between updates
- Small tweaks of text/images
- Small feature additions (large ones have to be handled like separate projects)
So, our solution is that we offer multi-year maintenance contracts wherein we upgrade your app to the current version (usually a significant effort), and handle its onoing support and upgrades. The price for this kind of retainer runs around $300/month, and there may or may not be an initial upgrade fee of $1000 depending on the age of the codebase. This solution saves companies thousands of dollars a month in the overhead of hiring a full-time developer.