What about hosting and maintaining an app?

I have built my app. It is ready to go live on the app stores. Sooo… what now?

There is nothing worse than a buggy app. Luckily for you, we are pretty good at this app building thing so you should be good. Either way, things happen, and you want to make sure you continue to deliver a good user experience consistently.

We like to build long lasting relationships with our clients. Our first ever client from 10 years ago is still a client today. It’s a journey. So after we have delivered on your app, we will happily maintain it. We fix any bugs that appear in the first month after launch at no extra cost. Thereafter we can agree a retainer with us for an agreed number of hours per month. We can spend time on maintenance but also enhancements which you’ll be sure to want. A retainer means we can keep the same team that built your app and are familiar with it on the project, even if not full time. If you are not updating features regularly the other option is for us to maintain/improve your app through an ad hoc change request process. You tell us what you need then we will quote you for that enhancement or feature.

Apps are a bit like icebergs - most of them are hidden out of sight. Typically there’s a database, APIs, algorithms etc that sit in the cloud and do most of the heavy-lifting. We typically use Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Services (including Firebase) or Microsoft Azure, but each app is different and often our clients have an existing hosting infrastructure we need to integrate with.

Hosting costs are generally surpisingly low and based on the number of users you have on the app as well as how data-heavy your app is. In other words if you have a lot of video and audio content then that will bring up your hosting costs and if your user base grows exponentially (not a horrible problem to have) then your cost will also go up. So in a sense hosting is a “good cost” because if it grows then your solution is becoming more popular. A $100 (R1,500) per month budget to start should be enough to cover hosting costs when you start out.

When it comes to hosting your app on the app stores, our clients typically host on our account at no cost but you are more than welcome to set up your own account if you'd prefer.