What is included in software maintenance, and is it worth paying for?
July 4, 2026 1 min read
Security patches, dependency updates, daily off-site backups, uptime monitoring and a written response time. It is worth paying for on any system whose failure would stop you trading for a day.
What actually breaks in year two
Not your code. The PHP version your host upgrades, the payment gateway that deprecates an API, the SSL certificate nobody renewed, the disk that filled with logs. Every one of those takes a working system offline and none of them is a bug in what was built.
What a retainer should include, in writing
A response time with a number in it. "Best effort" is not a commitment and you find that out on the day it matters.
Off-site backups, restored and verified on a schedule, not merely taken. And a named person, because a support queue at 9pm on a Thursday is not a plan.
When you do not need one
An internal tool five people use, on hosting your own IT manages, where a day of downtime is an inconvenience. Buy the backups anyway.
