“The quoted cost is the beginning of the conversation, not the end. Most of the real costs come after the project is 'done'.”
What the estimate does not includeThe development quote is the most visible cost of building software. It is rarely the largest. Founders who budget for the development quote and nothing else consistently find themselves with a finished product they cannot afford to run, maintain, or improve. This guide covers every cost category that comes after the quote — and some that run alongside it — so your budget reflects what you will actually spend.
Infrastructure and Hosting
Your app needs somewhere to run. For simple web apps and MVPs, platforms like Vercel, Render, or Railway provide affordable hosting starting at $20 to $100 per month. As your user base grows and your infrastructure requirements increase, AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure hosting costs scale accordingly — sometimes dramatically.
Database hosting is a separate line item. Managed database services (Supabase, PlanetScale, MongoDB Atlas) start at $25 to $50 per month for production use and scale with storage and connection volume. CDN costs for serving media and static assets are additional. Build these into your projections before you have revenue, not after you realise the monthly bill is unsustainable.
Third-Party Service Costs
- Payment processing: Stripe charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction — at $10,000 monthly revenue, that is $320 per month in fees
- Email delivery: Sendgrid, Mailgun, or Postmark — $10 to $90 per month depending on volume
- SMS and messaging: Twilio pricing varies significantly by country — budget $0.01 to $0.07 per message
- Maps and location: Google Maps API has a free tier but charges at scale — complex use cases can reach $200 to $1,000+ per month
- AI API costs: OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini API calls scale directly with usage — a chatbot with 1,000 active users can cost $200 to $2,000+ per month depending on query volume
- Push notifications: free at low volume, $20 to $200/month with dedicated services as you scale
App Store Fees
Apple requires an Apple Developer Program membership at $99 per year to publish apps on the App Store. Google Play requires a one-time $25 registration fee. Both stores take a 30% commission on in-app purchases and subscriptions — reduced to 15% after the first year of a subscription and for developers under $1 million in annual revenue on the Apple small business program.
Ongoing Maintenance
Software is not a one-time cost. It requires ongoing maintenance to remain functional: security patches for dependencies, compatibility updates when operating systems and browsers release new versions, bug fixes that emerge from real usage, and infrastructure updates as providers deprecate older services.
The standard estimate for annual maintenance is 15 to 25% of the original development cost. For a $60,000 development project, budget $9,000 to $15,000 per year for maintenance — not including new feature development. Skipping maintenance does not eliminate the cost; it defers it and makes it larger.
Post-Launch Development
Your MVP is not the finished product. It is the starting point. Every founder who has launched a product has discovered features that need to change, workflows that do not match how users actually behave, and things they wish they had known before building what they built. The cost of iterating on your product after launch is a real budget item.
Testing and QA
If your development quote does not include a separate QA phase, assume you will need one. A proper QA pass on a medium-complexity product takes one to two weeks and costs $2,000 to $8,000. Without it, you are relying on your development team to test their own work — which is not the same thing and produces proportionally more post-launch bugs.
The Full Budget Framework
Development cost
the quoted price for design, development, and initial QA
Annual maintenance
security patches, dependency updates, bug fixes
Infrastructure and hosting (first year)
add more for complex or high-traffic apps
Third-party service costs (first year, varies significantly by feature set)
Post-launch iteration (first year)
feature changes based on real user behaviour
The total all-in cost in year one is typically 1.5 to 2x the quoted development cost. In subsequent years, it is 35 to 60% of the original development cost per year for a maintained, actively developed product. Build these numbers into your financial model before you start, not after the first invoice arrives.
