Maintain or develop?

Do you maintain your developed sites?

Surely there is a misconception here.

I've always heard "Contract to build, and hire to maintain." If you work for a smaller development team, you'll probably do both, unfortunately.

I get sick of working on the same old project for too long, so having to maintain whatever I build would likely drive me nuts - unless it's a really enjoyable project. I've only had one or two of those in my past

Jonathan Sampson of
SampsonVideos

Classic!

I have built and I maintain sites as well (in a way) - so *shrug*

Both, though I prefer having other people do the maintaining so that I can see my ideas put to good use

I usually tell my clients that I will build the application/site and then maintain it for about 1 month or so after I sign it off to them, in order to iron out any bugs or add any last minute features. After that I usually charge a one off fee for basic work or by the hour for more in-depth work. It seems to work quite well. Anyone that I have done work for is free to hire someone else to do work on their application/site, my code is reasonably well commented and understandable, however they usually just drop me an email.

If I am expected to maintain a project for the lifetime of the said project, then I would expect some kind of recurring payment for "management", and I would really like to not get into that kind of situation just yet as it makes life far more difficult for me