Hiring Developers vs Using an Agency

In-House Developers: The Long Game

Hiring developers gives you a dedicated team with deep context on your business. They're available full-time, they accumulate domain knowledge, and they become part of your company culture. For ongoing product development, in-house is usually the right long-term choice.

The challenge is cost and time. A senior developer in the US costs $120K-180K in salary plus 20-30% in benefits, equity, equipment, and overhead. Hiring takes 2-4 months. Building a team of 3-5 developers to staff a custom project means $500K-900K per year in ongoing costs — and that's before they ship a single feature.

In-house makes the most sense when: you need developers permanently (not for a one-time project), you can attract and retain top talent, and you have enough work to keep them busy full-time.

Agency: Speed and Specialization

An agency gives you an experienced team that can start immediately. No hiring, no ramp-up. A good agency brings battle-tested processes, diverse experience from working across industries, and the ability to scale up or down as the project demands.

The trade-off is cost per hour and depth of context. Agencies charge $150-250/hour in the US (equivalent to $200K-400K/year for a full team), which is more than in-house developers per-hour. But you only pay for the hours you need, you get a team (not just one person), and the project starts in weeks instead of months.

Agency makes the most sense when: you need a specific project built (not ongoing development), you need to move fast, you don't have the capacity to hire and manage developers, or you need specialized skills your team doesn't have.

Freelancers: Flexibility with Risk

Freelancers offer the lowest cost entry point and maximum flexibility. A senior freelance developer in the US charges $80-150/hour. You can engage them for specific tasks without long-term commitment.

The risk with freelancers is reliability and continuity. A single freelancer can get sick, take on other work, or disappear. There's no team to pick up the slack. Code quality varies dramatically, and there's often no formal process for requirements, testing, or documentation.

Freelancers work best for: small, well-defined tasks with clear requirements, augmenting an existing team that can provide oversight, and exploratory work where you're not ready to commit to a larger engagement.

The Hybrid Approach

Many companies use a hybrid model: an agency builds the initial version of the software, then hands it off to a small in-house team for ongoing maintenance and feature development. This gets the speed advantage of an agency with the long-term economics of in-house.

For this to work well, the agency needs to build with handoff in mind: clean code, comprehensive documentation, standard tech stack, and a proper knowledge transfer process. We build every project as if someone else will maintain it — because often, they will.