In-house, agency
or freelancers?

Compare total costs, not headline rates, because the headline rate always misleads. An employee's salary is only the visible tip. Underneath sit recruiting fees or months of your managers' time, payroll taxes and benefits, equipment, licences, training and management. You may also pay a full-time salary for part-time work. A freelancer's hourly rate is the cheapest number on the page. The costs hide in your time: briefing, managing, reviewing and fitting the work together. They also hide in rework when the fit is wrong. An agency's day rate is the highest number on the page, and the most complete. Process, management, quality checks, tools and backup staff are all included.

What decides between them is how busy the role really is. Say you need a skill forty hours a week, every week, for years. In-house wins on plain arithmetic, and deserves to. If you need a skill in bursts, such as for a replatform or a launch, the maths flips. Between bursts you either pay an idle salary or pay a flexible partner only when you use them. We publish our own pricing openly because that's the comparison we'd want to make in your place. Freelance and salary figures for your market are easy to find. Gather them yourself rather than trust any agency's summary.

Freelancers and agencies start in days or weeks. Recruiting takes months, and pretending otherwise is how plans slip. A senior hire is a project in itself: writing the role, finding people, interviewing, notice periods and onboarding. Some hires don't work out. A wrong hire found at month four costs you the search twice, plus the lost time. None of this argues against hiring. It argues against hiring as the answer to an urgent need.

Freelancers are fastest for clear solo tasks, with one catch: the best ones are usually booked. Agencies sit in between. They take days to start formally, but the team arrives ready-made and used to working together. For our dedicated teams, eligible engagements can typically start two to three business days after scope, payment and required access are confirmed.

Quality depends on who owns the process, because quality comes from process as well as talent. In-house, you build the process: your hiring standards, your code reviews, your testing. Once it's built, in-house quality is excellent and keeps improving. Until then, quality depends on each person, as it does with freelancers. With freelancers, quality rests almost entirely on the individual. The best freelance specialists are as good as anyone, but quality varies widely around them. Portfolios and references are your only checks, and you have to run them for every piece of work.

An agency's offer is that the process comes included. That means peer review, quality checks and documentation. It also means a second developer who knows your code when the first is ill. That's true by design and worth real money. But agencies vary as much as freelancers do, so the same checks apply. Ask who exactly will do the work and how reviews and testing run. Ask what happens when something goes live broken. An agency that resents those questions has already answered them. We answer ours on how we work. Our client testimonials are the reference check we'd expect you to run on us.

In-house wins whenever a skill is central, permanent and full-time. If software is your product, your engineers should be your employees. Any agency suggesting otherwise is selling. The same goes for whatever makes your business different: that knowledge should grow inside your company, not a supplier's. In-house also wins on understanding your business. An employee learns your customers, politics and history every day. No outside partner can fully match that.

Freelancers win on clear, self-contained tasks. Examples are a set of brand illustrations, a technical audit, an expert opinion or a niche skill for six weeks. A trusted freelancer who knows your business well can be the best value on this page. They're cheaper than an agency, more committed than a stranger and faster than a hire. Both routes struggle in the same place: work across several skills at once, over many months, with a hard deadline. That's the kind of work agencies exist for. If your work isn't like that, you don't need one. We say this plainly as an agency. Being believed matters more to us than a lead who should have hired an employee.

The model that keeps working is a small in-house team plus a flexible outside partner. The in-house core might be a head of engineering or marketing, plus a lead or two. They own direction, knowledge and standards: they decide what gets built and keep quality high. The partner supplies the hands. That can be a dedicated team working all year, or specialist talent for skills too early to hire for. AI engineering is this year's clearest example. A partner also adds people when a launch or replatform squeezes the timeline.

The money explains why: you pay permanent salaries only where knowledge builds up over time, and rent the rest. The risk to guard against is depending on a partner without documentation. A partner that keeps knowledge to itself makes it hard to leave. So insist from day one on your own code repositories, your own tools, written handovers and clear IP ownership. We built our agreements around those terms. A partner that fears your independence doesn't deserve your trust. The same model runs inside agencies too. White-label delivery is an agency using our team under its own brand. So brands and agencies reach the same set-up from opposite sides.