A software maintenance retainer typically costs between $900 and $6,000 a month for a small-to-mid product, or roughly 15–20% of the original build cost per year. The number is set by engineering hours and response time, not by the size of your codebase: expect around 10 hours a month at the entry level, 30 in the middle, and 80 for a near-full-time engineer. Any quote that doesn't state hours isn't a price.
We went looking for what software maintenance retainers cost before publishing our own prices. Nine of the top ten results were agency blog posts, and most of them managed several thousand words without naming a figure. The one that did was a pricing-consultancy site, not an agency.
There's a reason for that, and it isn't complicated. An unpriced retainer can be quoted at whatever the buyer looks able to pay. So this post does the annoying thing and states numbers — ours, and the ranges we checked them against.
The two ways retainers get priced
Strip away the packaging and there are only two models.
Percentage of build cost. The long-standing industry rule of thumb is 15–20% of the original build cost per year. A $40,000 product implies $6,000–8,000 a year, or $500–670 a month. It's a useful sanity check and a poor pricing mechanism, because it prices the past rather than the work: a well-built $40,000 system needs less attention than a rushed $80,000 one.
Hours per month. You reserve a block of engineering time at a rate. This is what almost every retainer actually is once you read the contract, including the ones advertised as percentages. It's the honest version, because it's the only one where both sides can tell whether the deal is fair.
What the market actually charges
From published agency pages and pricing references as of August 2026:
| Model | Typical published range |
|---|---|
| Hours-based agency retainer | $1,200 – $25,000 per month |
| Small block (10–30 hrs/month) | $1,500 – $5,000 per month |
| Percentage of build cost | 15 – 20% per year |
| Offshore / smaller studio | $500 – $2,000 per month |
| Enterprise managed service | $10,000+ per month |
The spread looks absurd until you convert to hours, at which point most of it collapses into a fairly narrow band of effective hourly rates. The variation is time bought, not value delivered.
What we charge, and what it buys
Shark Labs publishes three tiers. These are the real numbers, the same ones on our retainers page.
| Tier | Per month | Hours | Response | New features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Keep the lights on | $900 | ~10 | 2 working days | No |
| Keep it moving | $2,500 | ~30 | Next working day | Yes |
| Dedicated | From $6,000 | ~80 | Same day | Yes |
Unused hours roll over for one month. Thirty days' notice, no minimum term. That combination is deliberate: a retainer that needs a twelve-month lock-in to make sense is one where somebody expected the client to want out.
Where the hours actually go
"Maintenance" sounds like watching a dial. On a live product with real users, a month looks more like this.
| Work | Typical hours |
|---|---|
| Dependency and security updates | 4–8 |
| Bugs reported by real users | 4–10 |
| Monitoring, alert triage, incident response | 2–6 |
| Small features and copy changes | 6–12 |
| Reporting and the scheduled call | 1–2 |
The item people underestimate is the first one. Dependency updates feel like housekeeping until you skip them for a year, at which point the upgrade path is four major versions long and it isn't housekeeping any more, it's a project.
AI features change the arithmetic
Conventional software degrades slowly and on your schedule. A feature built on a language model degrades on somebody else's.
- Model deprecations. Providers retire model versions on their own timetable. Migrating means swapping the model, re-running the eval suite and fixing whatever the diff exposes — typically four to twelve hours, arriving without warning.
- Cost drift. Token spend creeps up as usage grows or a prompt cache stops being hit. On more than one system, catching this has been worth more per month than the retainer cost.
- Quality drift. Your data changes underneath prompts that were tuned for how it used to look. Every test in CI stays green while the feature gets worse.
If your product has an AI feature in the core loop, budget toward the middle tier rather than the entry one. Not because it's more delicate, but because it changes without anyone touching it. Why AI proofs of concept never reach production covers how that usually plays out.
When hiring is cheaper than retaining
Here's the arithmetic that argues against us, because it's the question worth getting right.
A mid-level developer costs roughly $70,000–110,000 a year fully loaded in the US or Western Europe, or roughly ₹12–25 lakh in India. Call it $6,000–9,000 a month, or ₹1–2 lakh, before management time. For that you get about 140 productive hours a month from one person with one skill set.
| Option | Monthly cost | Hours | Per hour |
|---|---|---|---|
| Retainer, entry tier | $900 | ~10 | ~$90 |
| Retainer, mid tier | $2,500 | ~30 | ~$83 |
| Retainer, dedicated | $6,000 | ~80 | ~$75 |
| Full-time hire (US/EU) | $6,000–9,000 | ~140 | ~$43–64 |
| Full-time hire (India) | $1,200–2,400 | ~140 | ~$9–17 |
Read honestly, that table says: above roughly 80 hours a month, hiring wins on cost. It wins on context too — someone who lives in your codebase every day will know it better than we will.
What the per-hour number leaves out is that a retainer isn't one person. Ten hours of a studio's time can be ten hours of infrastructure, or mobile, or retrieval tuning, depending on what broke. And it doesn't take three months to hire, doesn't take holiday, and doesn't leave. Below thirty hours a month those advantages dominate. Above eighty they don't. The full in-house versus agency comparison is here.
Four questions before you sign anything
- 01How many hours, and what happens to unused ones? No number means no price. Rollover of a month is normal; indefinite accumulation means someone is promising capacity they haven't staffed.
- 02What's the response time, in working days, for a production outage? "Best effort" is a real answer at the cheapest tier and a bad one at the top.
- 03Who owns the infrastructure? If the agency's accounts host your production database, you don't have a supplier, you have a hostage situation. Everything should run on accounts you own.
- 04What's the notice period? Thirty days is normal. Twelve months means the relationship is expected to stop being worth it.
The short version
Expect $900–6,000 a month for a small-to-mid product, or 15–20% of build cost a year as a sanity check. Compare quotes by hours, not by headline. Budget higher if an AI feature sits in your core loop. And if you need more than about eighty hours a month, hire someone — that's the point where a retainer stops being the cheaper answer, and any studio that won't tell you so is optimising for its own invoice.