(SysAdmin_Jenny):
One thing that saved us was implementing self-healing capabilities and better monitoring. We were getting bot failures at 2am and nobody knew until business hours when processes were already backed up. Now we have automated health checks, failover logic, and real-time alerting. Still costs money to set up but prevents those catastrophic failures that tank your SLA and require emergency contractor help. The other piece is documenting everything obsessively. When your original developers leave and knowledge walks out the door, maintenance costs explode because new people are reverse-engineering how bots work. We instituted strict documentation standards and it was painful initially but now our junior team can handle most maintenance without escalating to senior developers. Time investment upfront but pays off when you're not constantly paying consulting rates for basic fixes. Question your vendor is dodging - why should upgrading make your bots less fragile? If the architecture's fundamentally brittle, more features won't fix that.
(RPAConsultant_Lisa):
Unfortunately this is extremely common and vendors definitely downplay it during sales cycles. Industry standard is maintenance running 15-20% of initial investment annually, but I've seen it hit 50% like you're experiencing when processes are volatile or integrations are complex. The three biggest cost drivers nobody mentions upfront: one, application updates breaking bots constantly, two, lack of proper documentation causing development debt, and three, no standardized components so every bot gets built from scratch. Your legacy system problem is brutal because screen scraping and custom transformation logic are maintenance nightmares. Every pixel change breaks the automation. What helps is building a reusable component library, investing in OCR engines that can handle format variations, and honestly just accepting that some processes aren't worth automating if the underlying applications change frequently. The other hard truth is that if you relied entirely on vendors to build everything, your internal team probably can't maintain it properly without emergency support contracts.
(FinanceOps_Mike):
Need to vent and also get advice. We implemented RPA three years ago and initial ROI looked great - saved about 400k first year. Fast forward to now and our maintenance costs have ballooned to almost 45% of what we originally spent on development. Nobody warned us about this. Every time our ERP gets an update, half our bots break. Legacy system integrations require constant custom coding because there's no APIs. Version control is a nightmare across 150+ bots. We're spending more time fixing bots than they're saving us in labor. Is this normal or did we just implement poorly? Our vendor keeps saying we need to upgrade to their enterprise tier for better stability but that's another 80k annually. Feels like we're trapped in an expensive maintenance cycle with no clear exit strategy.
