To facilitate a smooth user experience once the app goes live, strong post-launch support, rapid incident response, and continuous updates are often required—all while costs are kept predictable. Indian teams have now emerged as the world leaders in post-launch app maintenance, delivering 24/7 coverage, great technical skills, and tremendous cost savings when compared to providers in the West.
This post covers all essential information founders, product leaders, and CTOs should be aware of on how to operate high-quality post-launch support from India, from the typical L1–L3 support models to developing reasonable monthly budgets, constructing playbooks for swift incident resolution, and orchestrating upgrades that will future-proof your app. With cost graphs and process flows, it makes the difficult support concepts more understandable.
Level 1 (L1) Support
The L1 group acts as a help desk for end users and employees. They answer routine questions (account resets, navigation assistance), they log incidents, and they do a first level of troubleshooting, all through scripted, structured dialog and runbooks. L1 employees can be non-engineers and have good communication and ticket triage skills.
Hours Covered: 24/7 (strict SLA with possibly dedicated staff for peak hours)
Pricing (India): $8–$15/hour or $900–$2,000/month per agent full-time
Level 2 (L2) Support
L2 engineers work on more challenging and repetitive problems that have been escalated from L1. These are things like bug isolation, error log scrutiny, very minimal code/config fixes, and advice based on well-documented configuration changes. L2s have more in-depth technical understanding—they are typically junior developers or QA specialists.
MTTR target: 2 hours (business hours), 4 hours (P2 incidents outside business hours)
Cost: $18–$40/hour; monthly engineer: $2,000–$4,500 engineer
Level 3 (L3) Support
L3 addresses the most critical app incidents (production bugs, DB/data corruption, major outages). L3s are senior engineers; they work on code-level fixes, hotfix releases, or incident management with the SRE/dev team. L3s also author or revise incident playbooks and contribute to upgrade planning.
MTTR target: <1 hour for P0/P1; root cause analysis in a day
Rate: $40–$75/hour or $6,000–$10,000/month for fractional engineer allocation
How Tiered Support Operates ([chart recommendation: support_escalation_flow.png])
Essential Incident Positions for Worldwide Coverage
With these roles being owned by the Indian team (North America/EU escalation being a backup during overlap), this provides 24/7 coverage and consistent reporting.
A robust Indian support model shall have well-defined Service Level Agreements for incident response and recovery, generally including:
| Incident Severity | Example | Response SLA | Restoration SLA (MTTR target, business hours) |
| P0 (Critical) | Outage, data loss | 15 mins | 1 hour |
| P1 (High) | Core feature broken | 30 mins | 2–4 hours |
| P2 (Medium) | Non-core bug | 1 hour | < 1 day (8 hours) |
| P3 (Low) | Cosmetics info | 4 hours | 3 days |
Playbooks are more error-proof, eliminate guesswork, and dramatically reduce the amount of time that it takes to resolve an issue—all of which are recently important factors for a team that spans multiple time zones and whose ability to communicate in real time has always been limited.
L1 monitors checks, requests users for error codes/screenshots, and reproduces on the user’s behalf; L2 verifies the auth service status, investigates logs, and resets impacted accounts if necessary; and L3 debugs code if it still exists, creates a hotfix, and initiates a retest.
Indian teams typically deliver around-the-clock coverage at 40-70% lower overall cost than U.S. or EU providers, due to a combination of talented staff, lower salaries, and established outsourcing infrastructure.
| Support Type | Monthly Cost (India) | Example Inclusions |
| Basic (L1 only, 16/5) | $900–$2,500 | Coverage, ticket triage, simple fixes, reporting |
| Standard (L1/L2, 24/7) | $2,500–$6,000 | L1+L2, basic bugfix, configs, uptime monitoring |
| Premium (L1–L3, 24/7) | $5,000–$12,000+ | Full-stack, senior engineers, rapid incident fixes |
Outsourcing post-launch app support to India provides 24/7 continuity, advanced technical expertise, immediate incident coordination, and significant long-term cost reduction. To maximize results:
A strategic support relationship with the right Indian vendor ensures your app stays strong, secure, and competitive—without escalating maintenance costs or unexpected outages.
