Build or hire

The question is not salary against rate

A studio's rate includes things a salary does not: the employer's contributions, benefits, equipment, software, office, management, the time between projects, and a margin. A salary includes none of those, and it buys one person with one set of skills. So putting the two numbers side by side compares a finished product with one of its ingredients.

The better question is what you need over the next two or three years. A product you will keep developing every week for years wants a team of its own. A product that needs a burst of building and then steady care may not. Most companies need some of each, at different times.

We are a studio, so read this guide knowing that. We have tried to set out the costs on both sides from public sources, and to say plainly when hiring is the better answer. The figures below are for British Columbia, where we are based.

What hiring really costs

Start with the wage. The Government of Canada's Job Bank publishes hourly wages by occupation and region, from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey. Its figures for British Columbia are below. Senior people with in-demand skills are paid at or above the high end.

Then add what an employer pays on top. In 2026, employers match the employee's Canada Pension Plan contribution at 5.95% of pensionable earnings, up to a maximum employer contribution of $4,230.45 per employee ^[3], and a second additional contribution applies to earnings above that ceiling ^[3]. Employment Insurance premiums are 1.4 times the employee's rate, up to a maximum employer premium of $1,572.30 per employee in 2026 outside Quebec ^[4].

• Employer health tax: British Columbia employers with B.C. remuneration of $1,000,000 or less are exempt, and larger payrolls pay it ^[5].
• Vacation pay: in British Columbia at least 4% of total wages, rising to 6% after five consecutive years of employment ^[6].
• Benefits: Job Bank reports that 97.5% of software engineers and designers in British Columbia receive at least one non-wage benefit, such as a pension plan, health or dental insurance, or paid leave ^[1].
• WorkSafeBC premiums, which depend on your industry classification.
• Equipment, software licences, cloud accounts for development and testing, training and conferences.

None of that is unusual, and none of it is avoidable. It is simply the cost of an employee, and it is part of what a studio's rate already covers.

The cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet: time

The largest cost of hiring is often not money but calendar time, and it is easy to leave out because it does not arrive as an invoice.

1. 01

   Recruiting

   Writing the role, advertising it, screening, interviewing and negotiating takes weeks to months for a good senior engineer. A recruiter shortens it and charges a fee for doing so.

2. 02

   Notice and start

   The person you choose usually has to give notice to their current employer before they can start.

3. 03

   Ramp-up

   Even a strong hire needs time to learn your product, your customers and your way of working before they are fully productive.

4. 04

   Management

   Someone has to set priorities, review work, run one-to-ones and make technical decisions. If that someone is a founder, it is time taken from everything else.

5. 05

   Coverage

   One developer is a single point of failure. Holidays, illness and resignations stop the work, and the knowledge leaves with them.

What a studio really costs

A studio's price is higher per hour because it carries all of the above for you, and because you only pay for the hours the work takes. Before you compare, check what the quote includes and what it leaves to you.

• Included in a good quote: project management, design, engineering, testing, deployment, documentation and a warranty period after launch.
• Usually separate: hosting, third-party services and licences, a support plan or retainer after the warranty, and any new features you ask for later.
• Hidden in a poor quote: testing and project management left out to make the number smaller, which come back as delays and defects.

The other cost of a studio is dependence. If the studio holds the code, the accounts or the knowledge, you are tied to it. Insist that the repository, the cloud accounts and the domain are in your name from the first week, and that the handover documents are written for someone who has never seen the project.

When hiring is the right call

• The software is your product, and you will be developing it every week for years. Owning the team that owns the code is worth the overhead.
• You already have technical leadership: someone who can hire, manage and review engineers well.
• The work is steady enough to keep each hire fully busy, across design, frontend, backend and operations, or you can hire people who cover several of those.
• Speed of a first release is less important than building long-term capability.

If those are true, hire. We would rather tell you that than sell you a project you will regret outsourcing.

When a studio is the right call

• You need several skills for a defined period: design, frontend, backend, mobile, DevOps, testing, perhaps AI or blockchain, which would be several hires.
• You need to start now, not after a hiring round.
• The work comes in bursts: a build, then maintenance, then another build.
• You do not yet have the technical leadership to hire and manage engineers, and want to learn what you need before you hire it.
• The project needs specialist skills you will not need full time afterwards, such as a smart contract or a custom model.

The hybrid that often works best

Many of our clients do both. A studio builds the first version with a full team, while the client hires one or two engineers who join the project before launch. By handover, the client's own people know the code, the documentation is written for them, and the studio steps back to a support plan or a retainer for the parts the in-house team does not cover.

This sequence also makes hiring easier. Candidates join a product that exists, with a working codebase and tests, rather than a blank page and a promise. And you hire for the skills the product has shown it needs, rather than guessing.

Make the handover part of the contract from the start. Name the people who will take over, give them access to the repository and the planning board from the first sprint, and book time for pairing and code walkthroughs in the last milestones. A handover squeezed into the final week is a document; a handover spread across the project is a team that knows its code.

A worked example to set against a hire

The worked example below shows the range from our rate card today for a web app with iOS and Android apps, payments and an admin side, with the hours by role and the payment schedule. Look at how many different roles appear. Then ask how many people you would need to hire to cover them, and how long it would take to find them.

Common mistakes in the comparison

• Comparing a salary with a rate. Compare a year of a fully loaded employee with a year of the work you actually need done.
• Assuming one hire covers every skill. A strong backend engineer is rarely also a strong designer, mobile developer and operations engineer.
• Forgetting the gap before the first hire starts, and the months before they are fully productive.
• Forgetting what happens when the only developer leaves. Documentation, tests and a second person who knows the code are what make a departure survivable.
• Treating the choice as permanent. Many companies start with a studio and build an in-house team as the product grows, or the reverse when a product settles into maintenance.

How to decide

1. 01

   Write down the next three years

   What has to be built, when, and what happens after launch. A product roadmap answers more of this question than any spreadsheet.

2. 02

   Count the skills, not the people

   List every skill the work needs. If it is more than two or three people can cover, a studio or a hybrid is likely cheaper in practice.

3. 03

   Price both honestly

   Salary plus on-costs, recruiting, ramp-up and management for the hire; the estimate plus running costs for the studio.

4. 04

   Price the delay

   What does each month without the product cost you? If the answer is a lot, calendar time dominates.

5. 05

   Plan the handover either way

   Whoever builds it, make sure the code, accounts and documentation are yours, so the choice stays reversible.