Freelancer, agency, or studio? The honest comparison.
Freelance developers bill $60–$150 an hour. Agencies quote fixed or retained five figures. Both can be the right answer, and the wrong choice usually costs you the entire first build.
When a freelancer is the right call
When you know exactly what you want, the spec is stable, and you or someone on your team can review the work technically. A good freelancer at $100 an hour building something well-specified is excellent value, and better value than an agency layer on top of the same work.
Where it goes wrong is not skill — freelancers are frequently excellent engineers. It is continuity and scope. When the spec moves, hours move. When the freelancer takes a full-time job in month four, your production system has no maintainer, and the person who understood it is gone.
When an agency is the right call
When you need many disciplines at once — design, engineering, compliance, project management — and you have the budget for the overhead that coordinating them requires. The cost is the layer of people who are not building. That layer is worth paying for on a large programme and pure waste on a small one.
The third option
A small specialist studio sits between the two: the people who scope your build are the people who ship it, but with the continuity, process and paper that a freelancer cannot offer. Fixed prices, because the work is repeatable. Named backup engineers, because one person going on holiday should not stop your production system.
We work this way deliberately — senior operators across four countries rather than a pyramid with juniors at the bottom.
The four questions that decide it, whoever you hire
- What happens if the person building this becomes unavailable? If there is no answer, that is your answer.
- Is the price fixed, and what happens if it takes longer? The answer should be "our problem", in writing.
- Who owns the code and where does it run? Your repository, your cloud, from day one.
- How do we know it works? An evaluation set from your real cases, agreed before the build, not a demo afterwards.
These four questions are worth more than any portfolio review. We put them in a free scorecard you can run against any vendor, including us.
$3,500, fixed, with a named backup engineer and the repository in your name. Every build ships in your cloud, under your accounts, with the repository in your name. See your price in three questions, grade us first with the AI Vendor Scorecard, or book a call with an Applied AI Scientist.