Look at your expenses. Your water bill, gas bill, electric bill, and everything else will go up because your house is bigger than your apartment. You might have other expenses creep up on you that you\u2019ve never had before, like a gardener or a landscaper to maintain your property. However, with less expense you can prepare to be the envy of the neighborhood using these custom house numbers<\/a> here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Software development is the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever you scale up from a small project to a bigger project, there are certain expenses that you\u2019ll incur on an ongoing basis. Everyone is so busy determining the development rates, they forget about the post-launch hidden development costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this guide<\/strong>, we\u2019ll explain the five anticipated hidden costs of software after you launch it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who developed your software? The app development team will continue to maintain your software even after you launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your software is going to evolve with the market as new opportunities present themselves. The vision will also evolve based on customer demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You always need to remember one thing<\/strong> \u2014 stagnant technology is dead technology<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Look at companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and all of the other global giants out there. They\u2019ve done a pretty good job at developing software, wouldn\u2019t you agree? Everything you can possibly think of has been developed. So why do they have an army of engineers working behind them? Software development is never finished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between maintenance, new features, customer demand, and just scaling the platform, you\u2019ll always need your staff to maintain this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On average, look at how often mobile apps are updated and enhanced.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Roughly 30% of apps are updated at least once per month. An additional 53% of apps are updated every six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So you can\u2019t plan to let your development staff go after the launch date. The team members who developed the app will continue to stay on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The truth of the matter is this; if you get rid of people, your software will slowly die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Remember, to maintain a competitive edge in this crowded market, you must constantly evolve. The software you started with needs to change and adapt over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You might have some wiggle room with the capacity of staff that you need to keep. For example<\/strong>, you hired five engineers during development. But now you just need two or three. Your team will still be comprised of engineers, a QA professional, DevOps, a designer, project manager, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These post-launch development costs must be taken into consideration and planned for ahead of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You must anticipate hosting costs in your initial budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These costs are incurred from hosting the servers for your software. You\u2019ll have email servers, push notification servers, analytics servers, integration servers, and other servers depending on the type of app you\u2019re developing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most likely, you\u2019re dealing with a company that delivers you a product or SaaS that you\u2019ll pay a monthly fee for. Or you\u2019re hosting the software somewhere in the cloud with a company like Amazon Web Services. There will be a monthly fee for this type of hosting as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not only will you incur these expenses post-launch, but the costs will rise as your company scales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s very important that you prepare for this from a budget standpoint. There will be ongoing hosting costs to maintain those hosts. If your servers are hosted in the cloud, you\u2019ll still need a staff member on your team to deal with those servers. This brings us back to our first point about needing to continue paying your staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Before your launch, I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve gone through the technology to make sure that everything was working properly. All the bugs were found, fixed, and you\u2019re done \u2014 right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s not necessarily true, especially in the mobile app space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While you might have fixed the bugs for certain devices or specific operating systems, devices evolve over time. When this happens, your technology or application could regress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take a look at the average cost to maintain an app in the first year after launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of you probably know why software development is expensive. But why is it so costly to maintain? What are companies spending $10k-$25k+ per year on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n As new demands come from Apple or Google, your compliance levels might downgrade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New legislation comes into effect for the quality of your app, the security of your app, or the privacy of your app. All of these things could change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m referring to things like:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The list goes on and on. Your technology needs to evolve as all of these things change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Refactoring is another side of maintenance that\u2019s worth highlighting on its own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea behind refactoring is that you write code that\u2019s just good enough to pass basic testing, compliance, limitations, or something else. Then you go back and clean it up at a later time. Here\u2019s a simple visual explanation<\/a> of how refactoring works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of your code that was put in during development might have been \u201cgood enough\u201d at the time. But as you scale, it must be rewritten to manage the new traffic load as your business grows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be honest, these are good problems to have. It means that your app is growing. But you still need to anticipate the costs ahead of time to be fully prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here\u2019s another analogy. Let\u2019s say you have a commercial printing press company. Your main printer is currently printing 5,000 flyers per day. It starts to malfunction, so you fix it with a \u201cband-aid\u201d solution. You know that your fix will get the machine back in action to continue producing 5,000 flyers per day. But if you ramp up to 10,000 flyers, the band-aid won\u2019t be sufficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, that\u2019s a great problem to have. When you get to that number, your daily business just doubled. But it comes with added maintenance costs that you need to plan for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Training is the most underestimated expense in terms of hidden software costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The biggest mistake that people make is assuming that their staff who is maintaining the app is going to stay with them forever. But that\u2019s not going to happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In reality, some of your staff will make career decisions and leave you. You\u2019ll be unhappy with other team members, and you\u2019re going to fire them. This is just standard procedure when it comes to running a business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There will always be turnover in personnel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happens when you lose someone with crucial domain knowledge? Don\u2019t assume that whoever you hire will be able to replace that person immediately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just because someone is a good developer or a good engineer, it doesn\u2019t mean that they understand your software. They are a good engineer for the software that they\u2019ve developed\u2014not necessarily what you\u2019ve developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So it takes time for them to understand your business model, technical depth, infrastructure, and other components of your software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The average cost<\/a> to recruit, hire, and train a new employee is $4,000.<\/p>\n\n\n I know some of you might think that engineers are a dime a dozen, and you can find them anywhere. But even if someone is a blackbelt and an expert, they will not be an effective part of your team as soon as they come in. This takes time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So how can you avoid these expensive training costs? The idea here is to avoid single points of failure with human beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You wouldn\u2019t want a single server to run your entire mobile app, right? If the server dies, the app dies with it. The same thing can be applied to people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you have one person with so much domain knowledge \u2014 what if that person gets hit by a bus? Can you and your business actually continue without them?<\/p>\n\n\n\n You need to cross-train people. Make sure that your capacity isn\u2019t at a bare minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Always have at least one spare person. If you only need two people at a minimum, then you should probably hire a third person. So if one person leaves, you\u2019ll still have enough to operate. When that happens, you can always hire someone else as that \u201cspare tire.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s say you have a retail store. You only need two people at the counter per shift\u2014two in the morning and two in the afternoon. Would you only hire four people? No. If someone quits, gets fired, goes on vacation, or calls out sick, you\u2019ll be short-staffed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So even if you only need two people to operate the store per shift, having three fully-trained employees available is a safer option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This analogy is magnified in the software development world if the person who leaves takes all of the knowledge with them. Training a new person could be near impossible if nobody has the information to provide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Strategic costs are incurred whenever your business sees a new market opportunity. You need to shift gears quickly to make sure that you can actually address the market need.<\/p>\n\n\n\n01: Maintaining Your Staff<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/azoora.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/01-Mobile-App-Updates.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n02: Hosting Expenses<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
03: Maintenance<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/azoora.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/02-App-Maintenance-Costs.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nRefactoring<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/azoora.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/03-Refactoring.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n04: Training<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/azoora.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/04-Training-Costs.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n
In the tech industry, you can expect these costs to be even higher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n05: Strategic Costs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/azoora.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/05-First-Mover-Advantage.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n