What a system costs to run once it is live

The build price gets all the attention. The number that matters over five years is what it costs to keep running, and what that figure is actually buying.

Three things, not one

Running cost splits into infrastructure, monitoring, and support. Businesses tend to hear one number and assume it is a maintenance retainer, which it is not.

Infrastructure

Hosting, the database, backups, and the domain. For most service businesses this is the smallest line, and it is billed to your own accounts, not ours. You can see it, and you would keep paying it if we vanished.

Monitoring

Something watching whether the system is up, whether jobs are running, and whether anything failed quietly. This is the line that businesses cut and then regret, because the failure mode of no monitoring is finding out from a customer.

Support

A person who answers when something is wrong at eight in the morning, and who makes the small changes a business needs in its first year. Most of what gets asked for in that year is a rule change, not new software.

Why it is flat

It does not move when you hire, because nothing about the cost of running the system depends on how many people open it. That is the whole structural difference from what you were paying before.

What it does not include

New capability. Building a second department into the system is a new phase with its own price. We say this early because a maintenance agreement that quietly absorbs feature work is how both sides end up unhappy.