Why the budget usually stops at launch (and why that hurts later)
Most web projects have a clear line item for design and development and an almost empty line for what happens next.
The project gets scoped, estimated, and approved. The launch date becomes the big milestone everyone works toward. The weeks after launch are busy: content tweaks, analytics checks, a bit of polish. Then, slowly, the site fades into the background of daily work. The budget does too.
Until something breaks.
A form silently stops working for weeks. A dependency update takes the site down on a Friday night. A security issue shows up in the news, and you are not sure whether your stack is affected. At that point, maintenance becomes a series of urgent tickets and unplanned invoices.
The goal of this article is to flip that story. Instead of treating maintenance as an unpredictable cost, you can understand what it usually covers, how much it tends to cost for business websites, and how to plan a realistic ongoing budget that does not feel like a surprise tax on your launch.
Launch is not the end of the project
A modern business website is not a PDF. It is a small piece of software that lives on servers you do not own, built on top of libraries you did not write, running in browsers you cannot control, being used by people on networks you do not manage.
All of those layers change over time. Browsers update. Frameworks release new versions. Security issues are found and patched. Your own content and tracking snippets evolve. Even if nothing “new” is added to the site, the environment around it shifts every month.
That is why maintenance exists. It is not an upsell invented by developers. It is a way of keeping the thing you just invested in aligned with the reality it runs in.
The article on web design and development retainers explains the structure of ongoing support in more depth. Here, we focus on the numbers: what maintenance tends to include and how to put a sane price tag on it.
What web development maintenance actually includes
Maintenance is not one service. It is a bundle of recurring responsibilities that keep your website safe, stable, and usable.
In practice, a typical maintenance setup for a business or marketing site tends to include a mix of:
Security and software updates that keep your framework, libraries, and tooling from falling too far behind.
Backups and uptime monitoring so outages are noticed quickly and rollbacks are possible when something goes wrong.
Bug fixes and layout corrections when real-world use exposes issues that did not appear in testing.
Small content and UI tweaks as your services, team, or messaging evolve.
Occasional performance checks to make sure new content or scripts have not slowed down key pages too much.
Anything that looks like a new feature, a major design shift, or a deep structural change usually sits outside basic maintenance. Those are projects in their own right.
Typical maintenance cost ranges for business websites
Public data from hosting and maintenance providers gives a useful shape to maintenance pricing, even if exact numbers differ between markets.
Basic plans for simple small-business sites often start in the low double-digit range per month when they only cover automated updates and backups. Once you add human involvement—real debugging, content changes, performance checks—plans climb into the low hundreds.
For custom business and marketing sites in the €10,000–€50,000 build range, yearly maintenance budgets frequently land somewhere between 15% and 25% of the original project cost. That matches the rule of thumb used in many software contexts: ongoing care is a fraction of the initial build, but a meaningful fraction.
You can also look at it from the other direction. In the 2025 web development cost guide, projects for business websites sit in clear ranges based on complexity. If you treat 15–25% of that number as your annual maintenance envelope, you very quickly see what is realistic:
At €15,000 initial investment, a reasonable yearly maintenance budget lives around €2,250–€3,750.
At €30,000, you are closer to €4,500–€7,500 per year.
Beyond that, the question becomes less “How much?” and more “How do we want to structure this—retainer, internal capacity, or ad-hoc?”
These are not rules, but they give a reference point that is less arbitrary than “we will see what happens”.
Maintenance vs ad-hoc emergencies
On paper, skipping maintenance and paying only for fixes when things break looks cheaper. You avoid a recurring expense and tell yourself you will call a developer if something important happens.
The problem is that issues very rarely announce themselves politely.
Forms can fail quietly after an update, collecting nothing for weeks.
Tracking scripts can stop sending data while dashboards keep showing old numbers.
Subtle performance regressions can slowly reduce conversions without anybody noticing a dramatic event.
When you do notice, it is often because a potential client mentions a problem or a campaign underperforms. At that point, the cost is not just the emergency invoice. It is the missed opportunities while the problem was invisible.
Paying for maintenance is not just about preventing outages. It is about shortening the time between something breaking and someone who understands your stack noticing and fixing it.
In other words: ad-hoc work optimises for lower visible cost; maintenance optimises for lower hidden cost.
Planning a realistic maintenance budget for your site
You can turn maintenance from a vague worry into a clear line on your budget with three simple steps.
First, look at how much you invested in the current version of the site. The numbers are usually in one of your previous project proposals or invoices. Then decide whether you want to follow a percentage-based approach (for example, 15–25% of that number per year) or allocate a fixed annual amount that feels comfortable for your current stage.
Second, decide what that budget needs to cover. Is it only safety—updates, backups, and emergency fixes—or do you also want room for small improvements and experiments? The retainer article covers this distinction between “keep the lights on” and “keep improving”.
Third, decide whether you want that budget as a predictable retainer or as an internal envelope that you consciously spend throughout the year. The first option gives you a stable rhythm; the second demands more discipline from your side but still beats pretending maintenance does not exist.
The important part is not the exact euro figure. It is making maintenance visible instead of discovering it one surprise at a time.
How maintenance costs change over the life of a website
Maintenance does not stay flat across the life of a site.
In the first year after launch, work is often lighter and leans toward minor fixes and content adjustments. Most dependencies are still current, and the architecture is fresh. The main goal is to keep everything stable and iron out edge cases that appear once real users arrive.
In years two and three, the environment starts to move. New versions of frameworks and tooling appear. Browser changes require adjustments. Your own content grows, and you may want to add new sections or micro-features based on what you learned from analytics. Maintenance begins to include small upgrades and occasional performance work alongside routine tasks.
By years four and five, you are often preparing for a bigger shift: a redesign, a deeper structural change, or a migration to a newer stack. Maintenance in that phase feels heavier because you are keeping the current site healthy while planning for what comes next. The article on business website redesign ROI dives deeper into that decision.
Seeing this curve ahead of time helps you avoid the feeling that maintenance suddenly “got expensive” when in reality the site simply moved from early calm into a more mature phase.
Using maintenance to protect your original investment
It is easy to think of maintenance as a running cost separate from the initial project. In reality, the two are tightly linked.
If you treat launch as the end and ignore maintenance, the effective life of your new site is shorter. Security issues pile up, content becomes outdated, and performance drifts until you feel forced into a full redesign earlier than necessary. The initial investment never has time to pay for itself.
If you pair a well-scoped project with steady maintenance, the picture flips. The site keeps working, keeps reflecting your current positioning, and keeps converting. Your investment has time to compound.
From that angle, a maintenance budget is less a new expense and more an insurance policy on the five figures you already spent.
Bringing maintenance into your next planning session
Maintenance is much easier to handle when it is not negotiated in a panic.
The next time you plan your marketing or technology budget, you can treat the website like any other asset that needs care. Put a number on what you are comfortable allocating annually. Decide what that number should cover. Decide how you want to structure the relationship with whoever maintains the site—internal, external, or a mix.
If you want a deeper dive into how ongoing support is structured, the article on retainers for design and development work pairs naturally with this one. For a broader view of overall project cost ranges, the 2025 web development cost guide provides the missing half of the picture.
Once those pieces are in place, maintenance stops being an afterthought or an unpleasant surprise. It becomes a planned part of how your website supports your business over the next three to five years instead of just the next launch date.
