Application maintenance costs can certainly add up over time, especially if you aren’t tracking how much you are spending and where that money is going. Too often, companies will spend without thinking about how much of their budgets goes towards keeping applications running smoothly.
In fact, many companies tend to believe that adding new people to the staff will bolster production and, therefore, mitigate costs. Or they believe that cutting in certain places will offset the costs of application maintenance. In some instances, these approaches can be used as smaller parts of bigger application maintenance plans, but they cannot be the only steps taken.