What staff augmentation means
With staff augmentation, developers join your team and work under your direction. They use your repository, your tracker and your rituals. You decide what gets built and in what order, and you review their work like anyone else's. You pay for their time, usually per month.
- You keep full control of priorities and technical decisions
- You need a technical lead and a clear backlog
- Capacity is flexible: add or remove people month by month
- Risk of delivery stays with you
What a project team means
With a project team, an agency takes responsibility for a defined result: a product, a module or a release. It brings its own product manager, designer, developers and QA, plans the work and reports progress. You approve the scope and each stage, but the team organizes itself.
- The agency owns delivery against the agreed scope
- You need clear goals, not a technical lead
- Pricing is per project or per stage, agreed before work starts
- Risk of delivery is shared, with the agency carrying the execution
The key question is who owns the outcome
If you can answer "what should the team do this week" yourself, every week, staff augmentation works. If you would rather answer "what should exist in three months" and let someone else plan the weeks, you need a project team. Most other differences follow from this one.
When staff augmentation is the better fit
- You have a product in production and an engineering lead
- Your backlog is longer than your team can handle
- You need a specific skill for a few months, such as React, Python or mobile
- You want to test a hire before building the role permanently
Our staff augmentation services and dedicated developer plans are $4,900 a month part-time or $8,900 full-time per developer, cancellable at the end of any month.
When a project team is the better fit
- You are building a new product or a large new module
- Nobody on your side can lead engineering day to day
- You need design, development and QA together
- You want a known price for each step before you commit
Our project work runs in four stages: Discovery and scope, Design, Build sprints and Launch, each with a fixed price paid before it starts. See software development pricing.
Comparing the costs fairly
Monthly developer plans look cheaper than project budgets, but they buy different things. A project budget includes product management, design and QA and ends with a defined result. A developer plan buys capacity that you direct. To compare, add the time your own team will spend managing augmented developers, and the cost of design and testing you still need elsewhere.
Combining both
A common path is to start with a project team for the first version, then switch to one or two dedicated developers who already know the code for ongoing work, with a maintenance plan for monitoring and updates. The reverse also happens: a team using augmented developers hands a self-contained module to a project team so its own people can stay on the core product.
A quick decision checklist
- Do you have a technical lead with time to direct more people
- Is the work a defined result or an ongoing stream
- Do you need design and QA, or only development
- Do you need a known price before starting
- How long will you need the extra capacity
If most answers point to direction and an ongoing stream, choose augmentation. If they point to a defined result and a known price, choose a project team. For a broader comparison including in-house hiring, read hire developers vs agency.
See both options priced
Run the estimate form to see what your project would cost as a staged build, then compare it with monthly developer plans.