Price and terms
Around $20k a month. That is one engineer.
Load a good senior properly — salary, employer costs, recruiting fee, equipment, the manager’s time — and one of them costs about this. The question isn’t the number. It’s what the same number buys.
Compared
The money
| Option | Freelancer | Agency | One senior hire | Here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $5k, once | Two to three times this | About the same, fully loaded | ~$20k a month, cancellable |
| Starts | This week | After the discovery phase | Month three or four | Next week |
| Scoped by | A few days of guessing | Weeks of paid discovery | Whoever you hired, once they’ve ramped | The first call |
| Throughput | One person, part of the time | A team, on their schedule | One person building | One person deciding, a fleet building |
| You get | A prototype | Production software, their timeline | The capability in-house, permanently | Production software and its architecture |
| Changes | It breaks, nobody knows why | New quote | Theirs, while they stay | You make them |
For the engineer they forward this to
The hire column is the strong one, and it has a real advantage this doesn’t: the capability ends up inside the company and stays there. Worth saying plainly rather than arguing around.
What the comparison leaves out is who assesses the candidate before anyone signs, the months of recruiting before they start, and the ramp after that. And the throughput isn’t like for like — a hire is one person building, where this is one person deciding and a fleet building. Whoever scoped it on the first call is on the call every week after.
Terms
Terms
- Provenance. Whoever scopes it on the first call is on your weekly call and answers for what ships. That doesn’t get delegated.
- Cancellation. Monthly, company to company, a month’s notice. No minimum, no setup fee, no seat cost. The cancellable month is why the rate sits here rather than where a year’s commitment would put it.
- Thirty days. You don’t check this at the end. At thirty days you compare what shipped against the acceptance criteria written at the start, and the second month starts only if you want it to. That is the answer to hiring a supplier with no references — a short first bet, checked early.
- Custody. Repository and cloud accounts in your company’s name from day one.
- Acceptance. An end date and a written definition of done, agreed before work starts — including the three tests the documentation has to pass.
- What you send me. What the fleet touches and what it doesn’t.
The first call is free and the first month is cancellable.
That’s deliberately the cheapest way to find out whether this is wrong for you.