Comparison
Hire someone, or hire a team by the month?
A first developer hire is a serious commitment — salary, equity, management, and the risk of hiring wrong when you can't yet evaluate the work. Here's an honest comparison, including when hiring is clearly the better call.
The short answer
Hiring wins when the work is continuous, core to your product, and you can technically evaluate candidates. A studio wins when the work is project-shaped, needs several disciplines, or you need to start before a three-month hiring cycle finishes.
Side by side
Where each one actually wins.
| Factor | hiring in-house | Us |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per year | Salary, taxes, equipment, software, benefits. | Only what you commission. Nothing between projects. |
| Time to start | 6–12 weeks to hire, plus notice period and ramp-up. | ✓Days. |
| Range of skills | One person's skill set, however good. | ✓Engineering, design, SEO and AI as the work needs them. |
| Deep product knowledge | ✓Compounds every month they stay. | We learn your product, but we don't live in it. |
| Availability | ✓Every day, all day, on your priorities. | Scheduled work, not a person at a desk. |
| Hiring risk | A bad hire is expensive and slow to unwind. | ✓Stop after the project. No severance conversation. |
| Management overhead | You manage, review, and grow them. | ✓None — we manage ourselves. |
| Culture and continuity | ✓Someone invested in the company long-term. | A supplier, however good the relationship. |
When you should NOT pick us
Written plainly, because the alternative is you finding out three weeks in.
- Software is your product, not a support function. You'll always need engineers.
- The work is genuinely continuous — a full-time backlog for the next year.
- You can technically evaluate a developer's work. If you can't, a bad hire can go unnoticed for a long time.
- You want institutional knowledge that compounds and stays.
- You've raised funding partly on the strength of building a team.
We've turned work away for every reason in the left-hand list. It costs us a project and saves both of us a bad one, which has consistently been the better trade.
When we're the right call
- You need something live before a hiring process could even finish.
- The work needs several disciplines and you'd otherwise hire three people.
- You're pre-product-market-fit and a salary is the wrong commitment right now.
- You have an in-house team that's buried and needs capacity, not headcount.
- You want senior judgement without a senior salary — that's what the fractional CTO retainer is for.
If you pick us
What it would actually cost.
Public starting prices, so you can compare like for like rather than waiting on a quote.
from $449/mo
Fractional CTO
Senior technical judgement on retainer — architecture, hiring, vendors and roadmap, without a full-time salary.
Monthly · cancel any time
from $1,199
Web app / SaaS platform
A real product with accounts, permissions, payments and an admin panel — built to be run, not just demoed.
6–12 weeks
from $479
API & backend engineering
The layer nobody sees and everything depends on — designed to be correct under load, not just correct on a laptop.
3–8 weeks
01
14-day money back
02
Fixed price, in writing
03
You own all of it
04
No lock-in on monthly plans
Still weighing it up
Tell us what you're deciding between.
Describe the project and we'll tell you honestly which of the options above fits — including when the answer is one that doesn't involve paying us.
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