Agency vs in-house team: when hiring beats outsourcing

en 2026-09-21 6 min read

Hiring beats outsourcing when the work never stops: if someone needs to work on your software continuously, a salaried developer ends up cheaper than any studio invoice, ours included. If the work is a website with an end, an outside team is the cheaper answer, and the price is public: EUR 1.500-3.500 for a business website at step 03, then EUR 100-300 a month on Care only if you want someone keeping it healthy.

The easy mistake is to compare a salary with a project fee as if they were the same kind of number. A salary is a commitment that renews whether or not there is work that month. A project fee ends.

Start by counting the work

Before you compare a hire with a studio, write down every piece of work you can foresee on your site or product, one plain line each. If the list is a new site followed by a handful of text changes, you need neither an employee nor a retainer. You need a build, and then either nothing or Care at EUR 100-300 a month for updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes.

It is tempting to hire a developer because the site annoys you. If the list is short, buy the build, learn the CMS, and spend the salary on something that brings in customers.

When hiring in-house genuinely wins

This is the case against paying a studio, and in the right situation it is the stronger one.

• The software is the product. If customers log in and use what you sell, the knowledge of how it works belongs inside the company, not in someone else's inbox.
• Change is constant and small. Copy, pricing, features, experiments. Through an outside team each one is a message, a quote and a place in a queue. A colleague just does it.
• Your business rules are unusual. If explaining them takes real effort, you want to explain them once, to someone who stays.
• You can judge the work. A lone developer with nobody able to review them builds what seems right to them, and you cannot tell whether it is. Hiring works best when someone in the company can read what they ship.

If the first two are true, hire. Do not spend that budget on a studio first.

The real cost comparison

Comparing honestly means comparing the whole shape of each cost, not the headline figure. Look up the current gross salary for the role on a job board in your country, then read down the middle column and add everything else to it.

The second row decides it. An employee is a fixed cost that does not care whether this month holds any work. A project is a variable cost that stops. Everything else in the table is detail around that one fact.

What an outside team costs, step by step

Put a number next to your own list.

Two things can continue after launch: Care at EUR 100-300 a month, and SEO growth at EUR 500-800 a month for technical and on-page work, service and location pages, internal links and reporting. The SEO foundation at EUR 450-750 is a one-off. A fixed quote always follows scoping, and every step is set out in full here.

Hire for the stream, buy the burst

The two are not rivals. A website is a burst of work: design, build, launch, then very little. A product is a stream. Bursts are what an outside team is for, and streams are what employment is for. If you have both, hire the person who owns the product and buy the marketing site, the rebuild or the integration as a project. Whatever you buy, the client owns the code, the repository and the database, so your hire inherits it with nothing to negotiate.

Process and timeline

How we build is described on design and engineering and Next.js development. The order is always the same:

1. Scoping: what the thing has to do, who uses it, what it connects to.
2. A fixed quote against one step, in writing.
3. Design and build, with review rounds on real content.
4. Launch and handover of the repository, then a decision on Care.

Delivery runs 1 to 2 weeks at step 01, 2 to 3 weeks at step 02, 3 to 6 weeks at step 03 and 6 to 12 weeks at step 04. Step 05 is quoted after discovery. The part that stretches is content and access: text, images, logins to your own tools. This is the part that waits on you, and it would wait just as long for an employee.

When to spend less

• Your list of work fits on one line. Hire nobody and commission nothing. Rewrite the page that matters most yourself.
• Nobody finds the site. Start with the SEO foundation, a one-off at EUR 450-750, before anything structural.
• You are not sure the offer sells. Step 01 at EUR 600-900 is enough: one page, a form, analytics.
• You want to hire but cannot write down what the person would do first. Then you are not ready to hire, and not ready for a studio either. Write the brief before you spend anything.

In the first and last case, do not hire us yet, and do not hire anyone.

Common questions

Is a freelancer cheaper than both?

For one defined task it can be, and for a small site a good freelancer is a reasonable call. The trade-off is cover: one person means one holiday, one illness and one set of skills. Ask who answers when the site is down and they are unreachable, and decide whether you can live with that answer.

What happens to the code if we stop working with you?

Nothing changes about who owns it. The code, the repository and the database are yours.

Can we start with a project and hire later?

Yes, and it is a sensible order. Your first hire then starts with a working codebase to read instead of a blank repository and a vague brief. It also gives you a finished piece of work to judge candidates against.

How do I compare a quote with a salary fairly?

Put both over the same period. On one side, the project fee plus Care and any SEO work you have decided on. On the other, salary, employer charges, holiday allowance, equipment and recruitment. Then set both totals against the list of work you wrote at the start.

Send us that list and we will tell you which side of the line you are on, including when the answer is to hire someone instead. Start the conversation here.