Disclosure: I work with ZoopCoder, an Indian development agency that sells maintenance plans. So take the sales-shaped parts with appropriate salt — but every number below is published, checkable, and I've included the cases where you should buy nothing at all.
There's an asymmetry in maintenance that almost no quote explains, and it catches technical founders as often as non-technical ones:
A website left alone mostly keeps working. An app left alone stops being installable.
Same neglect, completely different outcome. Nothing in your code changed in either case. The difference is whose calendar the decay runs on — and once you see it that way, "do I need a maintenance plan?" stops being one question and becomes two.
The website case: decay is mostly optional
A static brochure site — no logins, no payments, no database, no plugins — has almost nothing to rot. Renew the domain, keep hosting paid, and it will serve the same HTML in 2028 that it serves today. Let's Encrypt renews the certificate itself.
So the honest floor for keeping a small site alive in India is not a monthly retainer. It's this:
| Item | Typical cost per year (India, 2026) | Actually required? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain renewal (.com / .in) | ₹800 – ₹1,500 | Yes, always |
| Shared hosting | ₹2,000 – ₹6,000 | Enough for a brochure or small WordPress site |
| VPS / cloud hosting | ₹6,000 – ₹30,000 | Only for custom apps, real traffic, or live orders |
| SSL certificate | ₹0 | Free via Let's Encrypt. Never pay for a basic cert |
| Business email | ₹0 – ₹2,000 / user | Optional |
| Floor — small business site | ₹3,000 – ₹8,000 / year | Domain + shared hosting. That's the whole bill |
| Floor — custom app on a VPS | ₹7,000 – ₹32,000 / year | Domain + a real server |
₹3,000–₹8,000 per year is the floor. Compare that to a maintenance plan at ₹3,000–₹15,000+ per month and you can see why the distinction matters: those two numbers differ by more than an order of magnitude, and plenty of quotes blur them together deliberately.
The moment the site has moving parts, the maths flips hard. A WordPress or WooCommerce install is a live security exposure — an unpatched one is the single most common way Indian small-business sites get defaced, and cleaning up one hack costs more than a year of a basic plan. But that's a conditional cost driven by what you built, not an inevitability.
The app case: decay runs on Google's and Apple's calendar
Apps carry two costs websites don't, and one of them has teeth:
| Cost | Amount | What happens if you stop paying |
|---|---|---|
| Google Play Console | $25 one-time (~₹2,200) | Nothing. There is no renewal — pay once, ever |
| Apple Developer Program | $99 per year (~₹8,700) | Your app is removed from the App Store |
(Rupee figures are approximate and move with the exchange rate — the fees themselves are set in USD. Verify current fees with Google and Apple directly.)
But the fees aren't the interesting part. This is:
Google and Apple raise their minimum SDK, privacy and permission requirements on their own schedule, not yours.
An app left untouched for two years will eventually fail a store requirement and stop being installable — even though nothing about it broke, no dependency rotted, and you changed nothing. You didn't incur technical debt. The platform moved the floor underneath a binary that was, by every local measure, fine.
That's a genuinely different failure mode from "the code got old", and it's why "it's finished, we can stop paying" is a reasonable thing to say about a brochure site and a dangerous thing to say about an app. The website's clock is yours. The app's clock belongs to two companies in California who have never heard of you.
What plans actually cost, and where they sit in the Indian market
These are our published plans, not an illustrative example:
| Plan | Per month | Year one (11 mo) | Right for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Post-launch support | ₹0 (first 30 days) | — | Included with every project |
| Basic | ₹3,000 | ₹33,000 | Brochure sites, small WordPress sites |
| Professional | ₹8,000 | ₹88,000 | E-commerce, lead-gen, anything with live orders |
| Enterprise | ₹15,000+ | ₹1,65,000+ | SaaS, CRM, ERP, business-critical platforms |
Year one multiplies by 11, not 12, because the first 30 days post-launch are included — you're not paying a retainer during the month you're most likely to need one.
Add the floor to the plan and you get the real number: a small WordPress site on Basic is about ₹39,000 in year one (₹33,000 + ~₹6,000 renewals) and ~₹42,000/year after. A busy store on Professional is about ₹95,000 in year one. A SaaS on Enterprise starts near ₹1,90,000/year. Those are the numbers to budget — not the plan price alone.
For market context: published Indian agency rates in 2026 run ~₹1,500/month for a basic site to ₹50,000+/month for enterprise platforms, with e-commerce typically ₹10,000–₹20,000/month. Our Professional tier at ₹8,000 sits below that band. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend we're the cheapest at every tier — we aren't, and the Enterprise "+" is real, because scope sets the number and an SLA costs what it costs.
The percentage trap, briefly
Many Indian agencies quote an AMC as 15–20% of build cost per year. It sounds principled. It's the wrong shape.
Maintenance effort is driven by how often the thing changes, how much custom code it carries, and how much traffic and risk it handles. Your build price is none of those — it's a number from the past. So it fails in both directions:
| Scenario | Build cost | AMC at 18% | What the work is worth | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Expensive site, barely changes | ₹5,00,000 | ₹90,000/yr | Renewals + a few hours | You overpay, forever |
| Cheap build, became a busy store | ₹40,000 | ₹7,200/yr | Live orders, monitoring, fast response | You're underserved, and won't be told |
Row two is the dangerous one. ₹7,200/year is ₹600/month. Nobody monitors a live store for ₹600 a month. What you bought is the word maintenance, and you'll discover what it didn't include on the day something breaks.
When to buy nothing
We sell these plans, so hold me to this: a maintenance plan is a service you choose to buy, not a bill you automatically owe. Skip it if all of these hold:
- The site is static — no logins, no payments, no database, no plugins.
- It changes fewer than three or four times a year, and only text and images.
- No revenue depends on it being up this hour.
- Someone can email a developer when it breaks.
In that case: renew domain and hosting for ₹3,000–₹8,000/year and buy ad-hoc hours when you need them. Four small changes a year bought as hours will almost always beat ₹36,000 of retainer.
Buy the plan if it runs a plugin ecosystem, takes payments, stores customer data, carries leads or orders, or is something people log into to do their job. The dividing line isn't the size of your business or what you paid to build the thing — it's whether it has moving parts, and whether money flows through it. And if it's an app, remember the clock isn't yours.
The one clause that matters more than the price
Make sure you own the code, the domain and the hosting account. If you can leave, a maintenance plan is a service you're choosing. If you can't, it isn't a plan — it's rent on something you already bought. Check which one you're being offered before you compare prices, because that single fact determines whether the price means anything at all.
Full breakdown with the year-one arithmetic, the renewal floor and the market comparison: How much does website maintenance cost in India? · Plans are published at zoopcoder.com/pricing.php.
Top comments (0)