How much does web application support cost in the UK?
Enterprise application support in the UK usually starts around £1,950 a month, while commodity website care plans run £20 to £150 a month, with very little in between. Ours are £199 a month for monitoring, bug fixes and small changes with a next-business-day response; £499 a month to add same-day response in working hours and four hours of development; and £999 a month for a formal SLA with a committed response time, a priority queue and ten hours of development. All four tiers are rolling monthly and all four prices are published, so you can compare before you contact anyone.
What's included in a website maintenance contract?
At the £70-a-month level: managed UK hosting and SSL, daily backups with a tested one-click restore, software and dependency updates, uptime and performance monitoring, up to 30 minutes of content edits a month, and priority support with a reply within one working day. What it does not include is unlimited development. A maintenance contract that promises that is either priced for the worst case or is going to disappoint you, so larger changes are quoted separately on the same fixed-fee terms as any other work.
Can you take over an app another agency built?
Yes, and a good share of what we support we did not build. It starts with a takeover review: what it runs on, the state of the code and dependencies, where the data lives, what is missing, and what it will cost to hold. You get that in writing whether or not you go ahead. The one thing we will not do is quietly take on something we think is unsafe to keep running — if that is what we find, you will hear it before you sign.
What response times do you guarantee?
Care Plan at £70 a month: a reply within one working day. Webapp Care at £199: next business day. Webapp Care+ at £499: same day, within working hours. Priority SLA at £999: a contracted response time and a priority queue, agreed in writing. Working hours are Monday to Friday, 9am to 6pm UK time. We are a small studio and we do not sell 24/7 human cover — we would rather say that plainly than promise something we cannot honour at three in the morning.
Do we have to have built the site with you?
No. A large share of the support enquiries we get are for sites and applications someone else built and then stopped answering emails about. What matters is whether the thing is maintainable, not who wrote it, and the free review is what tells you that.
Can we cancel, and do we keep the code?
Yes to both. Every tier is rolling monthly with no minimum term, and you keep the source code, the data and the deployment setup throughout — support does not create lock-in. If you take it back in-house we hand over documentation rather than make it awkward.