Hire a Developer or Use an Agency?

The short answer

Hire in-house when the software is the business and the work never stops. Use an agency when the work has a shape and an end, or when you need four skills and cannot afford four people.

The mistake is hiring one developer to build a system that needs a designer, a backend developer, a mobile developer and someone who understands deployment, then wondering why it takes two years.

What one developer actually is

One good developer is one person's working hours, one person's judgement, one set of skills, and one holiday calendar. They cannot review their own code in any meaningful sense, and when they are stuck there is nobody in the room who has seen the problem before.

That is fine for maintaining and extending something that exists. It is poor for building something from nothing, where the early architectural decisions are exactly the ones that benefit from a second opinion and are most expensive to reverse.

The costs people forget

• Recruiting takes months. Good developers in Kathmandu have options, and the search itself is unpaid work for whoever runs it.
• You cannot technically assess them if you are not technical. This is the quiet failure. Many businesses hire the most confident candidate rather than the most capable one.
• Equipment, software, space, management. Real money that does not appear in the salary comparison.
• The bus problem. One developer who leaves takes the entire system's working knowledge with them, and the handover is whatever happened to be written down.

That last one is the serious one. We have been called in to take over systems where the only person who understood it left, and the recovery costs more than the original build.

What an agency actually is

An agency is several skills available part-time, a hard stop at the end of a contract, and an incentive to finish. You pay more per hour and fewer hours, and you do not carry the person between projects.

The weakness is that attention is divided and context walks out at the end. Mitigate it by insisting the knowledge lives in the repository and the documentation rather than in a person's head, and by owning your accounts from day one. Our vendor checklist covers how to tell a good one from an expensive one.

The combination that usually works

An agency builds the first version, an in-house person takes over the running of it, and the agency stays available for the larger pieces. The in-house hire is then maintaining something that exists, which is a job one person can genuinely do, rather than building something from nothing, which usually is not.

Hiring that person before there is anything to maintain is the sequence that wastes a year.

Frequently asked questions

Is an in-house developer cheaper than an agency?

Per hour, usually. Per outcome, only if there is enough work to keep them busy and their skills match what the work needs. A developer paid to wait for requirements is the most expensive option on the table.

Can one developer build my whole system?

Sometimes, slowly, if they are genuinely strong across the stack. Ask what happens when they are ill, when they disagree with themselves, and when they leave. If you cannot answer the third question, you have a risk rather than a plan.

How do I assess a developer if I am not technical?

Have someone technical in the interview, even if you pay them for the hour. Ask the candidate to explain a past decision they would now make differently, because the answer reveals more than any quiz about syntax.

What if the agency disappears?

You own the domain, the hosting, the repository and the data, so you can hand it to someone else. If you do not own those, see what to do when a vendor disappears, and fix it before it is urgent.

When should I hire in-house?

When there is a system to maintain, enough steady work to fill a week, and someone who can evaluate the hire. All three, not two of three.