Decision guide
In-house hiring vs a dedicated team
Both give you engineers. They differ in how fast capacity arrives, what happens when the roadmap changes, and where the knowledge ends up.
This decision is usually framed as a cost comparison, which is the least useful way to look at it. A salary and a monthly rate are not the same kind of number: one is a fixed, long-lived commitment with employment obligations attached, the other is capacity you can start and stop. Comparing them directly tells you almost nothing.
The questions that actually decide it are about time and permanence. How long can the roadmap wait for capacity to arrive? Is the work you need done a permanent function of the business, or a push with an end? And when the work is finished, does the knowledge need to live inside your company or is documentation enough?
Side by side
| Criterion | In-house hire | Dedicated team |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first commit | Weeks to months — sourcing, interviewing, notice periods, then onboarding. | Days to weeks — engineers are already hired, vetted and used to joining an existing codebase. |
| Cost structure | Fixed. Salary, benefits, equipment, recruitment fees and payroll taxes continue regardless of roadmap volume. | Variable. Billed monthly per engineer, scaled up or down as the work demands. |
| Changing your mind | Expensive and slow. Reducing headcount carries notice periods, cost and real human impact. | Contractual. Team size flexes with notice, without redundancy processes. |
| Where knowledge lives | Inside the company permanently — the strongest argument for hiring. | In your repositories and documentation. Retention depends on handover being built into the engagement, not bolted on. |
| Seniority available | Constrained by what your salary band and location can attract. | Senior engineers available immediately; you are renting experience rather than competing for it. |
| Culture and continuity | Full alignment over time. People accumulate context nobody wrote down. | Good when embedded in your standups and rituals; weak when run as a separate vendor track. |
Hire in-house if
- The work is a permanent function, not a project with an end date.
- The domain knowledge is your competitive advantage and must stay internal.
- You can afford the months of lead time before anything ships.
- You already have senior engineers who can interview well and onboard properly.
Use a dedicated team if
- The roadmap is slipping now and hiring will not land in time.
- You need a seniority level your salary band cannot currently attract.
- The scope has an end, or a scale that will drop once a milestone passes.
- You want your own hires to ramp alongside experienced engineers rather than alone.
Our take
The two are not mutually exclusive, and the most common healthy pattern is both: a dedicated team carries delivery while in-house hiring runs in parallel, then capacity steps down as the permanent team ramps. That only works if handover is designed in from the start — pairing, documentation and shared ownership of the code — rather than treated as a closing task.
Questions we get asked
Is a dedicated team the same as outsourcing?
Not as we run it. Outsourcing usually means work goes over a wall and comes back finished. A dedicated team works in your repositories, joins your standups and is accountable to your roadmap — the difference is whether the engineers are inside your process or outside it.
What happens to the code when the engagement ends?
It is yours throughout — we build in your repositories, not ours. Handover means documentation and pairing time during the engagement, so the transition is gradual rather than a single dump at the end.
Can we start small?
Yes. A common start is one or two engineers on a contained piece of the roadmap, which gives both sides evidence before anyone commits to a larger squad.
How is a dedicated team priced?
Monthly per engineer, based on seniority and role — typically $3k–$6k per person per month, with squads quoted as a bundle. There is no recruitment fee and no hourly billing.
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Still weighing it up?
Tell us the constraint you are working against and we will tell you which way we would go.