Is it better to hire a web developer or an agency?
This is a question that I’ve heard many times over the years.
When you hire a web developer, you can’t expect the same amount of attention to be given to the project.
Since there’s only one person behind the screen who’s trying to juggle everything at once, this poses a few risks.
You always need someone to double check your work, and once you scale out, it’s not feasible to just have one person managing all the servers, development, QA, testing etc.
I’ve experienced this recently with a client who has handed over a project to us after having worked with a developer who didn’t have the specilaised skills needed to deliver what was expected.
When this client first came to us needing help, I explained that there are a vast variety of different roles to cover and it’s not just all about coding. There’s testing, design, scalability and so on.
Based on each of these roles, if you were looking at hiring someone specialised for each, you’d be up for tens of thousands of dollars.
So in many cases, it makes much more sense to go with an agency.
Unless your project is quite small such as maintaining a small website with brief updates here and there, then using a web developer directly will do the trick.
Video Transcript:
Hi guys, James Little here in today’s video. I want to talk about the difference between hiring a web developer versus hiring a web agency. So hiring a web developer is great for a lot of projects. If you are just getting started out and there’s not an urgent pressing matter for getting features or getting your product to market, then a solo web developer can be great. And for a lot of cases, it’s definitely the right option. Now, if your product’s already been launched or you’re looking to launch with a certain level of speed and potentially, you know, that there’s a large scope for what you’re looking to achieve, then an agency’s going to be a better option. The biggest reason is that with a larger project, there is obviously more functionality that needs to be built. And not only that, once you start to develop larger feature sets and have a bigger code base to manage, then you do need to have additional roles in place, such as a QA or someone that is looking in looking after the development deployment.
So that’s a DevOps role. Now, if you’re looking for the easiest way to get started, definitely hiring a solo devs, gonna be your best way to get started, but there are gonna be some things that you realize over time where hiring just one person isn’t enough, cuz a lot of blind spots that pop up because really as a solo developer, there’s only so much you can do. If you are the one that’s coding and testing and ultimately doing the final QA on the code, then there are going to be times where you’ve missed out on certain things or you’re not considering the long term picture just because you are already spinning a lot of plates as is. And we’ve found that it’s great to get started potentially with one dev. And then when your developer is either overloaded, then you can look to bring on another dev or if you want to just go all in on day one, then you can hire an agency and they’ve got access to different roles and the roles are really gonna be providing you with that ability to make sure all base are covered.
So you’re covering the testing side of things, the dev, the scalability to security and then the front end design and the overall look and feel. Not only that, having an agency also allows you to look at things like the product management. So working with a dedicated product manager that understands roadmap development and the overall timeline of your applic is super helpful as well. And yeah, I hope you can see that the, there is a lot more that goes into building apps and just simply writing code. And there’s no disrespect to solo developers. They can do a fantastic job. It’s just, when you get time to a scale and your application starts to grow, then it’s only natural to need to cover those additional roles that do pop up as you’ve got more requirements. So I hope you got something outta the video. Let me know in the comments below if you’ve worked with developers or if you’ve worked with agencies. Thanks for watching. I’ll see you in the next one. Cheers.
