Your software will be hosted on a public cloud provider such as AWS, Azure, Google Cloud etc. There are ongoing costs for storing your data on these platforms, running your web and database servers and maintaining your backups. Additional ongoing costs may be for SMS or phone call credits, sending large volumes of emails or hosting and streaming data intensive content like videos to many users.
These costs are all dependent on the features you want in your software. We’ll try to give you the best estimate and offer you a fixed price based on the size of your audience. In some cases you may know how big you’ll need to scale your application and we can do that too. Your costs will scale with the number of users and data in your application.
Maintenance is another aspect and we generally recommend a certain number of hours are spent doing updates and small 15 minute features or changes to your software each month. We’ll give you an estimate of the number of hours we think we’ll need each month for maintenance but these hours will accumulate as credits that expire after 3 months. So if one month requires minimal maintenance for your application your unused credits will carry over to the next month. We’ll also give you an estimate of the typical monthly spend we see from our customers for applications of your size, particularly for new features and ideas that weren’t in the original scope. Once you start using your application you’ll quickly see its potential and the directions it can take. You’ll have many ideas for new features to automate various parts of your business.