Application Maintenance and Support Services | RaftLabs

A basic maintenance retainer — bug fixes, minor updates, dependency management, and monthly review — runs £1,500-£4,000 per month for most applications. Applications with higher complexity, larger codebases, or SLA requirements for incident response run higher. Ad-hoc project work (a specific upgrade or refactor) is scoped and priced separately.

Yes. We conduct an onboarding audit (1-2 weeks, £2,000-£5,000) to understand the codebase, document what's running where, identify the critical paths and known issues, and establish a baseline for support. After the audit, we take over maintenance on a retainer. We have picked up applications from agencies that closed, developers who left, and codebases that went unmaintained for years.

Retainers cover: bug investigation and fixes, security vulnerability patching, dependency and package updates, performance monitoring and alerting, database maintenance (index optimisation, backup verification), minor feature changes (up to 2-4 hours each), and monthly status reports. Larger feature work is scoped separately as a project.

We offer three response tiers: Critical (production down, data at risk) — 2-hour response, same-day resolution target. High (significant feature broken) — 4-hour response, 48-hour resolution target. Normal (minor bugs, non-blocking issues) — 1 business day response, 5-day resolution target. SLA terms are agreed at retainer start.

Yes. Applications running on end-of-life stacks (Node 12, Python 2, PHP 7, Ruby 2.x) need an upgrade path, not just patches. We scope the migration as a separate project alongside the maintenance retainer, typically upgrading in incremental steps to avoid a big-bang rewrite. See our software modernisation service for larger replatforming work.