So the system ages well.

Below that there’s no time to fix anything structural, only to put out fires. The first months go into putting the house in order — backups, updates, the things that were broken and nobody was counting on. The payoff comes after that, and charging for a single month would be selling the problem without the solution.

Yes, and it’s common. When there’s no documentation and no contact left with whoever built it, the starting point is an audit — that’s the legacy rescue service. Once the audit is done, the monthly contract runs as normal.

Whatever the company wants to move forward: a new page, a change to a flow, a report, a small integration. What doesn’t count is a rebuild — a new project is a new project, with its own scope and proposal, so the monthly fee doesn’t turn into an endless building site.