When hiring is the right decision
If the software is what you sell, a platform, an application, an online service, it must evolve every week at the pace of your clients, and nobody will ever know it as well as a team working on it every day. In that case, hire, and do it early: it is an investment in your product, not an IT expense.
Hire too when the workload is continuous and predictable: a permanent flow of evolutions, integrations and fixes that keeps one person busy full time all year. An in-house developer learns your business, your users and your data; that accumulated knowledge is worth a lot, and it cannot be bought.
The condition most often missing: someone to lead them. A developer needs a framework, priorities, a review of their architecture choices and an eye on security. Without technical leadership, you will not know whether the work is good until the day it has to be taken over.
What a lone developer does not cover
Software that lasts needs more than a developer: a design that makes the tool usable, a clean data architecture, hosting and security, usage measurement, and increasingly a well-framed AI component. One person does not combine all those skills, and that is no criticism: it is a job for several people.
Then there is continuity. The lone developer is away, falls ill, leaves for a more exciting project, and the code nobody else knows becomes a risk the company discovers on the day of departure. Documentation and code reviews are nothing superfluous: they are what makes software transferable.
Finally there is the hiring itself: the time to find the right person, to assess them without technical skills in-house, to onboard them, and the cost of a full-time position when the real workload comes in waves. A business tool has intense months and quiet months; a salary falls due every month.
What the agency brings, and what it does not replace
An agency brings first a complete team under a single responsibility: design, development, data, AI, hosting, with people brought in as the project requires rather than permanent headcount. With us, that means a written scope before the price, a price fixed per lot rather than by the hour, a delivery every week followed in your client space, and documentation that lets you carry on without us.
It then brings what comes next: Care, from €250 excl. VAT per month, for monitoring, backups, fixes and small evolutions; Partnership, from €2,500 excl. VAT per month, for a two-person team that delivers two days of production every month, carried over within the quarter, with a monthly review of priorities. That is the answer to workload in waves: you pay for the production you use.
What it does not replace: a decision-maker in your company. We turn down projects without an executive sponsor, because a system that cuts across the company cannot be carried by an intermediary alone. And the agency is not in your offices every day: if your product demands a daily presence, hire, or combine the two.
The real cost of both options
You know the cost of an in-house developer better than we do: the loaded salary, the hiring, the tools, the training, the management time, and the workload paid for even in quiet months. We publish no figure on that point, because it depends on your market and your region, and an invented figure would not help you.
The cost of the agency is public and known in advance. Sprint from €6,000 excl. VAT for one component in production within 4 to 6 weeks; Program from €15,000 excl. VAT for the complete system, training and documentation included; Signature program from €50,000 excl. VAT for platforms, with a dedicated team over several months. The payment schedule is written in our terms: 40% at order, 30% at design sign-off, 30% at go-live.
Compare on an equal scope and over time: what the tool must do in a year, who maintains it, what happens if the person or the provider leaves. What we deliver belongs to you, code, interfaces and content, transferred after full payment. That is the clause that makes the comparison honest, and one to demand whichever path you take.
The mixed path, often the most sensible
The two options combine well. The agency scopes and builds the foundation, then a hired developer takes over with the documentation; or the developer already in place focuses on the product while the agency delivers the components that call for other skills, design, data, AI. Product scoping, in 2 to 4 weeks, delivers mockups, an architecture and an estimate that belong to you, usable with the team of your choice.
For technical leadership without a director's salary, the Leadership partnership, from €5,000 excl. VAT per month, brings a fractional digital and AI director to your management committee every month: roadmap, budgets and vendors steered, production partnership included. Your developer then has someone to review their choices, and you have someone to understand them.
To decide, four questions: is the software your product? Is the workload continuous or in waves? Who leads technically? What happens if the person leaves? If you still hesitate, the €500 excl. VAT Express Diagnostic returns a written recommendation within a week, deducted from what follows if you continue, and it may well conclude that you should hire.