What does an internal software development team really cost?

Is it cheaper to hire developers or to buy the build?

It depends on whether you have enough continuous software work to keep people busy, and that is a question about your roadmap rather than about rates.

A salaried developer is a recurring commitment that reaches well into six figures once employer taxes, benefits, equipment, tooling and recruitment are counted, and it continues whether or not there is a project that quarter. A project price is a known number that stops.

Deliberately no salary benchmark on this page. Developer pay varies enormously by market, seniority and speciality, and a confident national figure would be the kind of borrowed precision this site exists to avoid. Your own recruiter or a current job posting in your market will give you a better number than we could, and the argument below does not depend on it.

Why one developer is not the answer

A single developer in a non technical company is a single point of failure with nobody to review their work. They cannot take leave without changes stopping, they have nobody to test a design decision against, and when they leave the knowledge tends to leave with them.

It is also a difficult job to hold. Developers generally want colleagues who understand the work, and a sole hire in a non technical company does not have any.

What an internal team genuinely costs

Beyond salaries, and these are the ones that surprise people:

• Recruitment. Either a large amount of your own time, or an agency fee charged as a share of first year salary.
• Ramp up. A new hire is not productive on day one in an unfamiliar domain, and in an operations heavy business the domain is most of the job.
• Management. Someone has to set priorities and review work. If that person is you, it is whatever you stop doing instead.
• The stack. Hosting, tooling, CI, monitoring and licences.
• Idle capacity. A team sized for your busiest project is oversized for the rest of the year, and software work is lumpy.

When internal is clearly right

• Software is the product you sell
• You have continuous change rather than discrete projects, at a volume that would genuinely keep more than one person occupied
• The domain knowledge is specific enough that transferring it repeatedly costs more than employing it
• A technical management layer already exists, so a new hire has someone to report to who can judge the work

When buying the build is clearly right

• You need one system, well built, in months rather than years
• The work after launch is maintenance and occasional change, not continuous development
• You would rather own the outcome than the hiring problem
• You want a fixed, known number rather than a standing cost

The arrangement most companies actually want

Buy the build. Keep a service plan for maintenance and small changes. Revisit the question when the pace of change genuinely justifies a salaried team.

That is not a sales position, it is the one that fails least often. Hiring ahead of the work is how companies end up with an expensive team maintaining a system that stopped changing.

What Goldstone costs by comparison

A focused business system costs $25,000 to $60,000 and arrives as a working system rather than as a hiring process. A service plan from $500 a month keeps it maintained afterwards.

Work out what a salaried hire costs in your market, add the items above that do not appear in a salary, and compare the annual figure against that. The comparison stops favouring us somewhere around continuous change at full time volume, and when you reach that point we will say so.

What to do next

Describe your problem for a preliminary plan and a band, or see pricing for the full structure.