Comparison

Studio, in-house, or freelancer.

We are a studio, so read this with that in mind. It is still worth writing honestly, because the wrong choice here costs months and we would rather lose the work than take an engagement that was never going to fit.

Talk it through When we are the wrong choice

Where each one wins

All three are correct in different situations

Hire in-house

Right when the product is the company and you will be building continuously for years. You get context that compounds, availability, and someone whose incentives are fully aligned with yours. The costs are the ones people underestimate: hiring takes months you may not have, a first engineering hire is a bet you cannot easily reverse, and until you have a second one there is nobody to review their work.

Hire a freelancer

Right for a bounded, well-specified piece of work when you already know exactly what you want and can judge whether it was done properly. Cheapest per hour, and genuinely the correct answer more often than agencies admit. The failure mode is not bad code, it is availability: one person with other clients, no cover when they are ill, and no second pair of eyes on anything.

Work with a studio

Right when you need a whole product shipped against a date and you do not yet have the internal capacity to specify, build and review it. You are buying a team that has done it before and a fixed price. The trade-off is real: you pay more than a freelancer, and you do not get the compounding context an in-house hire builds.

How each one fails

The failure mode is more useful than the pitch

Anyone can tell you what they are good at. What separates the options is how each one goes wrong.

In-house fails when you hire before you know

A first engineering hire made while the product is still undefined ends up building the wrong thing well. It is also the hardest decision to reverse, because it is a person rather than a contract.

Freelancers fail on continuity

The common story is not incompetence, it is disappearance. Work stops mid-build, the handover never happens, and you inherit a codebase nobody documented. Ask any freelancer what happens if they are unavailable for two weeks, and take the answer seriously.

Studios fail on distance

Large agencies put an account manager between you and the people writing the code, so decisions get slow and expensive. Ask directly who will write it and whether you talk to them. If the answer routes through a manager, price that in.

A note on numbers

We have not put salary benchmarks on this page

Most comparison pages like this one open with a salary figure and a freelancer hourly rate. We have left those out because we cannot source them for your market and your role, and an invented benchmark on a page whose entire purpose is honest comparison is worse than no benchmark. What we can tell you precisely is our own pricing, which is on the homepage and does not change depending on who is asking.

Questions to ask

Four questions that work on any of the three

Ask us these too. If the answers are vague, that is the signal regardless of which option you are evaluating.

What specifically gets cut to hit the date?

A named list of features is scoping. A vague answer means the compression is happening in code review, testing or documentation, and you pay for that later.

Who reviews the code?

If nothing gets read by a second person before it reaches production, you are buying one person's judgement with no check on it, whatever the arrangement is called.

What do I own, and when?

Repository, infrastructure and accounts, from day one or on final payment. The difference matters most in exactly the situation where you would rather not be having the conversation.

What happens in the month after launch?

Launch is when real users find what testing missed. If there is no answer here, or it is priced as a surprise, that is the month you will feel it.

FAQ

What founders ask at this decision

Is a studio just an expensive freelancer?+

If a studio gives you one person and an invoice, then yes, and you should hire the freelancer. What you should be paying for is a second pair of eyes on every change, cover when someone is unavailable, and a fixed price that absorbs the estimation risk rather than passing it to you. If those are not in the contract, the premium is not buying you anything.

What does a studio engagement actually cost?+

Ours is $3,999 for a clearly scoped Production MVP, fixed and agreed in writing before we build, live in 21 days. Larger scopes get a written milestone quote. After launch, a Growth Retainer is $2,999 per month for 40 hours of development, weekly calls and priority support. If you already have something broken, the first audit is free.

Can I start with a studio and move in-house later?+

That is the most common healthy path, and it should be an explicit option rather than something you have to fight for. You own the repository, infrastructure and accounts from day one, handover is documented, and going independent costs nothing extra. One of our clients had us train their own developers to maintain what we built.

How do I compare quotes fairly?+

Put every quote against the same product path and check whether design, backend, database, admin, payments, deployment, testing, monitoring, app-store work and handover are each included. A lower headline that omits the backend is not the same offer. Then ask what specifically gets cut to hit the date. If that answer is vague rather than a named list of features, the compression is happening somewhere you will pay for later.

Not sure which of the three you need?

Twenty minutes. Describe the product and the constraints, and we will tell you honestly which route fits, including when the answer is hire someone in-house instead.

Book the call