The honest truth about software is that the launch is the cheap part. The next ten years — patches, dependency upgrades, a Friday at 04:00, a deprecated API, a new compliance regime — that's where the real cost lives, and where most agencies quietly stop returning calls.
We don't. Maintenance is a first-class service for us, not the leftover budget after a build. We adopt existing codebases, learn their habits, and quietly bring them back into a state where they can be reasoned about and extended.
Often the work is unglamorous: a year of upgrades, a re-platforming of the deploy pipeline, a quiet rewrite of the worst-aged module. Done well, you stop noticing the system at all — which is the point.