The four options
- Hire your own developer as an employee.
- Use freelancers for individual projects.
- Work with an agency on defined projects.
- Use a dedicated team: an outside team that works on your business continuously, month to month.
None is right for everyone. The best choice depends on how much work you have, how varied it is and how much management time you can give it.
Option 1: Hire your own developer
Pros: they're fully yours, learn your business deeply and are available every day. Cons: recruiting takes time, salaries and benefits are a fixed cost even in quiet months, and one person rarely covers everything: design, front end, back end, AI, automation, SEO and hosting are different skills. If they leave, knowledge can leave with them.
Best when: you have a steady, full-time workload in one main skill area and someone who can manage technical staff.
Option 2: Freelancers
Pros: flexible, often affordable, and you can find specialists for specific jobs. Cons: availability varies, quality is hard to judge up front, and with several freelancers you become the project manager connecting their work. When something breaks months later, the person who built it may have moved on.
Best when: you have small, well-defined, one-off tasks and the time to manage them.
Option 3: An agency
Pros: a team with several skills, a defined process and accountability for a project. Cons: agencies usually work project by project, so after launch you may be handed over to "support" or quoted again for every change. The people who build your project may not be the ones you speak to later.
Best when: you need a clearly scoped project, like a new website, with a fixed deadline and budget.
Option 4: A dedicated team
Pros: the breadth of an agency with the continuity of an employee. The same people work on your business every month, learn your systems and handle design, development, AI and automation together. You avoid recruiting and can scale up or down. Cons: you're relying on an outside company, so choose one with clear communication, documentation and ownership terms.
Best when: you have ongoing, varied tech work (a website, automations, an AI agent, internal tools) and don't want to build a tech department.
Side-by-side
| Own developer | Freelancers | Agency | Dedicated team | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Start time | Slow (recruiting) | Fast | Medium | Fast |
| Range of skills | Narrow | Depends who you hire | Broad | Broad |
| Continuity | High while they stay | Low | Project-based | High |
| Management needed | High | High | Low | Low |
| Cost shape | Fixed salary | Per task | Per project | Monthly, adjustable |
Questions to ask any outside team
- Who will actually do the work, and will it be the same people each month?
- How do we request work and track progress?
- Who owns the code, accounts and domains?
- How do you document what you build?
- What happens if we want to stop or move to someone else?
- How do you handle time zones and response times?
A note on time zones
Working with a team in another time zone can be an advantage: work moves forward while you sleep, and you wake up to progress. It works well when there's a shared board for requests, regular written updates and calls scheduled at times that suit you.
Making the decision
If your work is steady and in one skill, hire. If it's small and occasional, use freelancers. If it's one big project, use an agency. If it's ongoing and varied, a dedicated team is often the most practical and cost-effective choice. Learn how our in-house tech team works, or see products our team has built, like the Online Booking Platform.