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You’ve recently launched a mobile game—congratulations! You should be proud of this huge accomplishment, but before you celebrate, it’s worth noting that there’s still work to do.
Once you launch your product, game maintenance is essential to prevent downtime and glitches. Neglecting this can cause paying customers to uninstall. Yet, with the value of the mobile games industry expected to be a whopping $312 billion by 2027, you don’t want to miss out on this market.
However, this can be a daunting task with a heavy price tag. That’s why you should prepare for app maintenance costs and understand the requirements you need to address to keep your game running.
This article is your comprehensive guide to app maintenance costs. It provides everything you need to know about costs and considerations for a smooth post-launch experience.
Key Takeaways:
Determining how much you should spend on app maintenance is tricky and may require collaboration with your development team. Still, there are a few rules you can generally follow to ensure success.
The industry standards suggest that in your first year of operation, you should plan to spend 50% of your initial development costs on maintenance.
After this, you should expect to spend 15-20% of your initial development cost on yearly maintenance. However, this is variable depending on your project. More complex projects with bigger teams will likely require higher app maintenance costs.
This seems like a significant amount of money. Still, investing in preventative maintenance will protect against costly and reputation-damaging bugs and glitches.
There are a few moving parts when determining app maintenance cost. The general rule provides an overview for budgeting purposes. However, it’s worth knowing where these numbers come from and where your hard-earned money is going.
Adding push notifications, servers, maps and payment gateways on your app will require you to source them from a third party. Depending on the complexity of your app, these fees can range from $100 to $350 a month.
Rolling out new content and updating old content on your app is vital to keeping it fresh and improving user experience. As part of your ongoing costs, you should factor in paying your development team an hourly rate to create new content.
The average cost for developers in the US is between $50 and $90 an hour, but the hours needed for these updates may vary.
Analytics is a type of monitoring that can help discern user preferences, understand user behavior, and refine your product. In short, it gives insight into what needs improvement within your app.
Getting good analytics and acting on them can lead to higher user retention, more engagement, and prompt predictive maintenance. Luckily, you don’t need to spend a fortune on it; good analytics software will only cost $5,000 to $10,000. Larger projects can also hire a professional analyst.
In the highly dense mobile game market, advertising is essential to encourage new players to try your game. The amount you spend is up to you. Whether you utilize free methods or spend thousands on an advertising campaign, what’s important is app user acquisition and encouraging engagement.
Depending on the scope of your project, you may need to hire customer support specialists to resolve issues. The average salary for customer service representatives is $15 to $20 an hour. More extensive projects may need more representatives.
Maintaining customer support boosts reliability and is helpful in troubleshooting.
You must pay to display your app on the Google Play store and Apple Apps. Google Play charges a one-time fee of $25, and Apple offers an annual subscription for $99.
Listing your app on these services is essential to draw new customers and make your app accessible.
Imagine you’ve just bought a TV. You take it out of the box and plug it in, only to realize that when you turn it on, it’s defective. This situation can be frustrating, and in most cases, it will result in a customer returning the TV. They may even leave negative feedback about your product.
Quality products need quality care, and your app is no exception. Maintaining your app is a great way to improve user satisfaction, meaning fewer uninstalls and a better return on investment. After all, if no one uses your app, you can’t earn money.
Addressing issues that can cause downtime and security breaches will improve your credibility with customers. It will also reduce losses associated with lapses in your app's performance and prevent costly reactive maintenance.
Most importantly, app maintenance is key to keeping your game relevant. By tuning your app to your customer preferences and providing quality service, you differentiate yourself from competitors in this high-density market.
To recap, once you’ve launched your app, you must budget 50% of the cost of production for the first year and 15% to 20% every year after for app maintenance costs. These costs pay for important features on your app, allow you to bugfix and apply updates, and reach your audience. Creating a mobile game requires significant financial investment but offers great ROI in a booming market.
For those of you with sticker shock, you should know there’s a better way to care for your app that will save you money. Sonamine offers all the services you need, from data analysis to messaging, reports, tweaks, and UX redesign. If you want to learn more about what Sonamine can do for you, contact us today to get started.
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For a limited time until Sep 2024, Sonamine is offering a 60 day money back guarantee to Braze customers. Come experience the ease and simplicity of the First Time Spender Nudge package and watch your conversions soar.
