Hire an agency for defined projects with a clear end: a website, a rebrand, a store build. Hire in-house when the work is continuous and central to your business, such as a product that ships changes weekly. The deciding question is whether the work ends, not which option costs less.
The question that decides it
Does the work end? A website launch ends. A rebrand ends. Building a product that ships changes every week does not end, and the economics of the two situations are completely different.
For work that ends, an agency gives you a full team for the duration and then costs nothing. For work that does not end, an agency becomes an expensive way to rent people you would be better off employing.
What an agency actually gives you
- A full team immediately: design, development, and usually content and strategy.
- No hiring risk and no notice periods.
- Experience across many projects, so problems you have never seen are usually not new to them.
- A fixed cost with a defined end.
What it costs you
- Knowledge leaves when the project does, unless you insist on documentation and handover.
- You compete for attention with their other clients.
- Changes after launch go through a commercial process rather than a conversation.
- Less deep understanding of your business than an employee accumulates over years.
Put handover in the contract, not in the closing conversation. Documentation, credentials, code ownership and a walkthrough should be deliverables with a deadline.
What in-house gives you, and the part people underestimate
An employee accumulates context. After a year they understand your customers, your systems and your constraints in a way no external team will, and they are available immediately when something breaks.
The underestimated part is that one developer is not a team. Design, front end, back end, infrastructure and quality assurance are different skills, and a single hire will be good at some and adequate at others. A genuinely capable in-house team is three or four people, not one, and it takes months to assemble.
The hybrid that usually works
The arrangement we see succeed most often is an agency for the build and an in-house person for the ongoing work. The agency delivers the initial project with a full team and proper handover, and an employee then runs, extends and maintains it.
For that to work the handover has to be real. Documentation, code ownership, credentials in your accounts rather than the agency's, and time budgeted for the employee to be walked through it. Where this fails, it fails because handover was an afterthought.
Questions to ask before signing with an agency
- Who owns the code and the accounts when we are done?
- What documentation is delivered, and is it a named deliverable?
- What happens when we need a change in six months, and what does it cost?
- Who specifically is working on this, and are they employees or subcontractors?
- Can we speak to a client whose project ended over a year ago?
