How do you track mobile app maintenance costs and ROI?

1 Define your maintenance goals

Before you start tracking your mobile app maintenance costs and ROI, you need to define what you want to achieve with your maintenance efforts. Do you want to fix bugs, improve performance, add features, comply with regulations, or enhance user experience? Depending on your goals, you will have different metrics and indicators to measure your success. For example, if you want to fix bugs, you might track the number and severity of reported issues, the resolution time, and the user satisfaction. If you want to add features, you might track the usage, engagement, and retention of the new functionality.

2 Calculate your maintenance costs

The next step is to calculate how much you spend on maintaining your mobile app, which includes both direct and indirect costs such as development and testing, hosting and infrastructure, marketing and distribution, support and feedback, and licensing and compliance. To estimate the marketing and distribution costs, you can use tools like App Annie, Apptopia, or Appfigures to track and analyze your app revenue, downloads, ratings, and reviews. You can also use tools like Jira, Trello, or Asana to manage your development and testing tasks and track the time and effort involved. Additionally, tools like AWS, Google Cloud, or Firebase can be used to monitor your hosting and infrastructure costs.

3 Estimate your maintenance ROI

Once you have your maintenance costs, you need to compare them with the benefits that your maintenance activities bring to your app. This is your maintenance ROI, or return on investment. To estimate your maintenance ROI, you need to quantify the value that your app generates for your business and your users. This can include revenue from sales, subscriptions, in-app purchases, ads or other monetization methods; engagement such as sessions, screen views, actions or events; retention or churn rate; loyalty through ratings, reviews, referrals or repeat purchases; and growth or acquisition cost. You can use tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics or Mixpanel to measure these values and help you estimate the value that your app brings. To calculate your maintenance ROI, use the formula: Maintenance ROI = (Maintenance benefits - Maintenance costs) / Maintenance costs. For example, if you spend $10,000 on maintenance and generate $15,000 in revenue, then your maintenance ROI is 0.5 or 50%. This means that for every dollar spent on maintenance, you get 1.5 dollars back in revenue.

4 Optimize your maintenance strategy

The final step is to use your maintenance costs and ROI data to optimize your maintenance strategy. You want to maximize your ROI by reducing costs and increasing benefits, so prioritize maintenance tasks based on their impact, urgency, and feasibility. Automating processes with tools like Fastlane, Bitrise, or App Center can streamline development, testing, and deployment workflows. Additionally, testing your app regularly with TestFlight, Crashlytics, or Appium will help with quality assurance, bug tracking, and user feedback. Analyzing app performance and user behavior with Firebase Performance Monitoring, New Relic, or AppDynamics can identify and resolve issues, bottlenecks, and opportunities. Lastly, experimenting with features and design with Optimizely, Apptimize, or Splitforce can run A/B tests, multivariate tests, or feature flags. By following these steps you can track and optimize mobile app maintenance costs and ROI to ensure your app remains relevant and profitable.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?