Who this is for
Teams with more roadmap than headcount. A founder who needs a second engineer before a permanent hire can be justified, a US or UK product team whose local hiring loop runs three months a seat, or an agency that has just won more work than it can staff.
Pricing is quoted per role after a scoping call. The figures on this page are published market benchmarks, not a CVS quote.
What's included
- Shortlist inside about five working days, interviewed by you
- A two-week trial before the contract commits
- Four to six hours of daily overlap with US, UK or Gulf hours
- Code, repos and IP assigned to you in writing
- Cover and replacement handled by us, not re-hired by you
- Monthly rolling contract rather than a fixed project scope
Three ways teams take this
Same vetting and the same contract terms underneath. What changes is who owns delivery.
A single dedicated developer
One engineer, full-time on your product, in your standup. Usually the first move when there is a roadmap but not yet a headcount budget.
Best for
A first or second engineer
A dedicated squad
Developers, QA and a project manager who has shipped this shape of thing before. We own delivery continuity, which means the same faces month to month rather than whoever is free.
Best for
A product you need built, not staffed
Staff augmentation
You keep your PM, your process and your board. We fill the seats you cannot hire for locally, and they work your way rather than ours.
Best for
An existing team that is short-handed
What one full-time senior developer costs, by where you hire
Market benchmark — not a CVS quote$70 – $130 / hr
$60 – $110 / hr
$40 – $120 / hr, depending who is free
$20 – $45 / hr — the model on this page
2026 industry benchmark ranges for one full-time senior engineer at roughly 160 hours a month, taken from public rate surveys rather than from our own book. The width of the freelance bar is the point: the same brief comes back at wildly different numbers depending on who happens to be available. We quote per role after a scoping call, so use this to sanity-check any proposal you get — including ours.
From first call to first commit
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Day 0
Scoping call
Roles, seniority, stack, and which hours you actually need covered. Twenty minutes with an engineer, no deck.
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Days 1 – 5
Shortlist
Two or three people per role, with the trade-offs written down. Stronger on backend, lighter on mobile — you get told, not sold.
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Days 5 – 8
You interview
Your technical round, your questions, your call. Say no as often as you need to; that is what the shortlist is for.
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Weeks 1 – 2
Trial
Real tickets in your repo, not a take-home exercise. At the end of it you continue, swap the person, or stop.
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Week 3 on
Embedded
They are in your standup and your board. You get a named contact here for anything contractual so it never lands on the developer.
What we staff
- React
- Next.js
- Vue
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- Laravel
- Flutter
- React Native
- Swift
- Kotlin
- Python
- Django
- Express
- MongoDB
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- LLM integration
- RAG pipelines
- Agent tooling
- Evaluation harnesses
- AWS
- Vercel
- Docker
- CI/CD
- Firebase
- QA
- UI/UX design
- Back-office support
- Customer support
If a stack is not on this list, say so on the call — we will tell you honestly whether we can cover it or not.
The terms that usually decide it
- IP and source code
- Work-for-hire terms. The code, the design files and the infrastructure config are yours, and that is in the contract rather than in a sales email.
- NDA
- Signed at company level and again by every individual assigned to your account, before repo access is granted.
- Hours overlap
- Four to six hours a day against your business hours, agreed in writing before anyone starts. US Eastern, UK and Gulf are the ones we cover most often.
- Cover and replacement
- If someone leaves or is not working out, finding the next person is our problem. You do not re-run a hiring process you already paid for once.
- No bench-swapping
- The person you interviewed is the person on your product. If that ever has to change, you hear it from us first — not from a different name in a pull request.
- Leaving
- Handover notes, runbooks and repo access stay with you throughout. Ending the engagement should not require our cooperation to be survivable.
Where we've done this
If you would rather buy the finished thing than add headcount, these are the products our own team builds — same engineers, delivered as a system instead of as seats.
Questions about this service
How is this different from hiring a freelancer?
A freelancer is splitting the week across several clients and carries their own risk. A dedicated developer works only on your product, and the risk sits with us — vetting, payroll, cover during illness, and the replacement if the fit is wrong. You are buying continuity as much as you are buying hours.
Who manages them day to day?
You do, in the single-developer and staff augmentation models — they take tickets from your board and sit in your standup. On a dedicated squad we supply the project manager and own delivery, and you review output rather than assign tasks.
What happens if the developer is not working out?
Tell us early. The two-week trial exists so that this decision gets made in week two rather than month five, and after the trial we still cover the seat and find the replacement. Re-running the hire is our cost, not a change order.
How much overlap will we get with our working hours?
Four to six hours a day, fixed in writing before anyone starts. For US Eastern and UK teams that covers your morning through mid-afternoon, which is enough for a live standup and same-day answers instead of a 24-hour round trip on every question.
Who owns the code?
You do. Work-for-hire terms cover source code, design files and infrastructure configuration, and repo access sits with you from day one rather than being handed over at the end.
What does it cost?
It is quoted per role after a scoping call, because seniority, stack and required overlap move the number enough that a single published rate would mislead you. The chart on this page is public market benchmark data, published so you can sanity-check any quote you are given — ours included.
Where does this model not work?
Two places. If the work is genuinely a two-week job with a fixed edge, a project contract is cheaper and simpler than a monthly seat. And if nobody on your side has time to review a pull request, a dedicated developer will not fix that — they will just produce work nobody is checking.