Maintenance is costlier than development

Many organizations do not realize that initial development and design costs are a fraction of total cost of the product over its lifetime. In some studies it is said that 70% of the cost could be in maintenance. Defining maintenance cost for software products is harder due to dynamic nature and fast paced delivery mechanisms deployed in software products. A paper has interesting study, if you were to develop and maintain an enterprise application for 5 years life cycle 21% of cost is incurred for design and development, rest 79% goes towards maintenance.

At the onset, many of our decision get biased towards ease of development, faster turnaround time for developers, which in itself is a essential, however, it should be considered with wider view of cost of full life of product, so you may ask questions like, are we using correct developer workflow, continuous integration infrastructure, talent pool, community support, tools, ecosystem richness, 3rd party software support.