You Are Not Really Choosing Between Agencies
Nearly every company that asks us about a monthly team is weighing it against something else entirely: advertising a permanent developer role. That is the comparison worth doing properly, so this page does it — including the parts where the permanent hire wins.
What a Permanent Developer Costs Before Anyone Writes Code
Salary is the line everyone quotes and roughly two thirds of the picture. The rest is unglamorous and entirely real.
| Line | Illustrative figure | Why it is easy to forget |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | £55,000 a year, used here purely as a worked example | Substitute your own number. London, Manchester, Bristol and Belfast are not the same market, and neither are 2019 and now. |
| Employer National Insurance | Several thousand pounds a year at the prevailing secondary rate | The rate and the threshold both move at fiscal events, so check the current figures with your accountant rather than a website. |
| Pension | At least 3 per cent of qualifying earnings | Auto-enrolment is a statutory minimum, and plenty of employers offer more to be competitive. |
| Recruitment | Commonly 15 to 25 per cent of first-year salary through an agency | A one-off cost, payable before that person has delivered anything, and payable again if they leave inside a year. |
| Equipment and tooling | A laptop, software licences, a training budget | Small individually. Not small when it arrives in the same quarter as the recruitment fee. |
| Paid absence | 5.6 weeks statutory holiday including bank holidays, plus sickness | Roughly a ninth of the year, before any parental leave. You employ a person, not an output. |
| Time to hire | Typically two to four months from advert to start date | Add the notice period they owe their current employer. Nothing ships during this time. |
| Time to productive | A further one to three months | Even an excellent engineer is slow in an unfamiliar codebase. You pay full salary throughout. |
| When they resign | One to three months notice, then the cycle repeats | And if they were your only developer, the knowledge leaves with them on their last afternoon. |
Every figure above is illustrative and not a quotation for anything. It is here to make one point: the interesting comparison is fully loaded annual cost against fully loaded annual cost, and the months before a new employee is useful belong in the calculation.
Where the Permanent Hire Genuinely Wins
We would rather say this here than have you discover it in month eight.
Accumulated context
Somebody who has sat in your business for three years knows why the Tuesday report matters, which customer will ring if a screen changes, and what was tried in 2023 and abandoned. No supplier can invoice for that, and after a few years it is worth more than the cost difference.
Being in the room
If your product is designed at a whiteboard with the operations team, in person, an employee is better placed than a team on a call. We overlap your morning; we are not at the standing meeting or in the corridor afterwards.
When software is the whole business
If engineering is what you sell rather than what supports what you sell, the capability belongs inside the company. A monthly team is a good way to reach that point and a poor way to stay there permanently.
The pattern we see most often is not one instead of the other. It is a monthly team while the product finds its shape, then one or two permanent hires taking the core in-house, with us continuing on the parts they do not want to specialise in.
Named People, Not an Anonymous Pool
You know who is working on your product, you meet them before they start, and they do not silently change between one month and the next.
1 mo
From agreement to a team working, rather than four
2 wks
Between builds you can open and try
30 days
Notice to change the size in either direction
You
Own the code, the repositories and the accounts
Backend engineer
Services, database design, integrations with the systems you already run, and the performance work that decides whether next year hurts. Usually the first person on a team.
Frontend engineer
The web application itself, including the accessibility work that matters if you sell to councils, the NHS or universities under WCAG 2.2 AA.
Mobile engineer
iOS and Android, native or cross-platform, including store submissions, release management and the annual compatibility work the platforms impose on everybody.
QA engineer
Test plans, regression runs before each release and automated coverage of the journeys that would embarrass you. Worth adding at around three engineers, rarely before.
DevOps engineer
Deployment pipelines, environments, monitoring, backups and hosting cost. Usually a fraction of a person rather than a whole one, and shared across the team.
Product designer
Screens, prototypes and the design system, so the fifth feature looks like it belongs with the first four. Often part-time across the engagement rather than continuous.
A technical lead is included on any team of three or more rather than charged as a separate head. Somebody has to review the work, and it should not be you.
Who Decides What, Written Down Before Month One
Nearly every unhappy outsourcing arrangement we have been asked to rescue had this boundary left implicit.
What Gets Built, and in What Order
Priorities, the order of the backlog, what a feature is actually for, which customer problem matters most this quarter, and the business rules only you know. You also own the decisions: an unanswered question is the most common reason a sprint underdelivers, and it is one we cannot fix from our side. One person on your side should own the priority list. Committees are slower than they think they are.
How It Gets Built, and by Whom
Technical approach, architecture, who on the team picks up which task, code review, testing, release mechanics, and the day-to-day management of people including leave and cover. If somebody is ill, that is our problem to solve rather than a conversation about your invoice. We also own telling you when a request is technically a bad idea, which is part of what you are paying for.
Trade-Offs With a Cost on Both Sides
Whether to spend a sprint on technical debt or on features. How much automated testing is proportionate. When to invest in performance ahead of growth rather than after an incident. Whether a compliance requirement gets designed in now or retrofitted later. We bring the options and the consequences; you bring the commercial context and make the call.
Arrangements We Will Decline
Directing individual engineers hour by hour, or treating the team as agency staff to be managed personally — that is a different relationship with different tax consequences for you. Timesheets in six-minute increments. Bypassing the priority list to hand tasks to an engineer privately. And a standing team with nothing queued for it, which we will raise with you rather than quietly invoice for.
Changing Size Without a Recruitment Round
The usual life of an engagement, and the notice each move needs.
Minimum engagement is three months. Below that, the time spent learning your product outweighs the time spent improving it and neither of us gets value from the arrangement.
How You Know What You Bought This Month
Buying time rather than an outcome only works if you can see where the time went.
The board and the repository
You have access to both, all the time, not a weekly summary of them. Every task, every commit, every review comment. Most clients look properly for the first fortnight and then stop, which is fine — the point is that it is open, not that you police it.
A daily written note and a monthly account
Progress at the end of each working day, and at the end of each month a plain summary of what shipped, what took longer than expected and why, and what is queued next. Written in English rather than in story points.
Talk to the engineers directly
No account manager sitting between you and the people doing the work. You are in the same chat channel as the team, during the morning overlap, and you can ask the person who wrote something why they wrote it that way.
Choosing This Over a Fixed Scope
A monthly team fits when
- There is at least six months of work and the order of it keeps changing.
- Real customers are already using something, so what to build next is a question answered by evidence.
- You want to ship continuously rather than to one delivery date.
- You are an SME with no engineers and no appetite to become an employer of them yet.
- Several products or systems need attention and none of them justifies a whole hire.
Buy a fixed price instead when
- You can describe the finished thing in writing, in rules rather than adjectives.
- A board or a lender has approved a specific number and needs it not to move.
- It is one job with an end, not a continuing programme of work.
- You want the risk of a bad estimate to sit with us rather than with you.
- Nobody on your side has time to prioritise a backlog every fortnight.
Questions About Running a Team This Way
How does the monthly cost compare with a permanent hire once everything is added up?
Compare fully loaded cost against fully loaded cost, not our monthly figure against a salary. A permanent developer costs the salary plus employer National Insurance, the minimum pension contribution, equipment, software licences, any recruitment fee, and the months of salary paid before that person is productive in your codebase. A monthly engagement with us is one invoice in sterling excluding VAT with no employment costs attached, and it starts producing work in the first fortnight. Where the permanent hire wins is over years rather than months: somebody who has been in your business for three years carries context nobody can invoice for. We will tell you when that is the better purchase.
Are we the employer of these people, and do the off-payroll working rules apply?
No, and they should not. You are buying a service from a company, not the labour of an individual through an intermediary, which is the arrangement the off-payroll working rules are aimed at. We employ the engineers, we pay them, we manage their leave and their equipment, and we remain responsible for delivering the work if somebody is ill. That said, status is decided on the facts of the arrangement rather than on the label attached to it, so if your finance team or your accountant wants the contract reviewed, send it to them. We would rather that happened before the first invoice than during an audit.
Will the team sign a data processing agreement and work to UK GDPR?
Yes. We sign a data processing agreement as a matter of course where personal data is involved, and we keep a record of what is processed and why. In practice the team works against test data rather than live records for the great majority of the work. Where production access is genuinely needed it is granted to named individuals, logged and time limited. If your build requires UK or EU data residency we design for it and use regions that provide it, and we will complete the technical sections of a client security questionnaire or an information governance form when your own customers ask you for one.
What happens to everything an engineer knows if they rotate off the team?
This is the honest weak point of any outsourced team and it is worth asking about. Our answer is structural rather than optimistic: decisions are written down in the repository rather than kept in heads, at least two people are familiar with every significant part of the system, and the daily written updates create a history somebody new can read. Where a change is planned there is an overlap of two to four weeks and the outgoing engineer does the handover as part of their normal week. Where somebody leaves unexpectedly it is slower, and we do not charge you for a replacement getting up to speed.
Can we scale down to one person over the summer and back up in September?
Yes, with 30 days notice in each direction, and it is a common pattern for seasonal businesses. Two practical points. Scaling back up is not instant: reserving the same people again depends on when you tell us, so a September return is much easier to guarantee if you mention it in June rather than in late August. And a team of one is a different thing from a team of three, not a third of it, because one person alone has nobody to review their work. At that size we usually suggest a maintenance retainer instead, which is cheaper and better suited to a quiet period.
Do we pay monthly in advance or in arrears?
Monthly in advance, in sterling, excluding VAT, with VAT added at the prevailing rate on the invoice. The first invoice is raised when the team is reserved rather than when they start, because reserving named people means turning other work away. Your purchase order number goes on each invoice where your finance system needs one, terms are 30 days, and a standing monthly arrangement can be set up on Direct Debit through GoCardless if your bookkeeper prefers it. Minimum engagement is three months, then 30 days notice either way.
Tell Us What the Next Six Months Contain
Send the roadmap, or the list of things nobody has had time to do. We will suggest a team shape and a monthly figure in sterling excluding VAT, and say if a fixed price would serve you better.