Comparison
Outsource development or hire in-house: the hours threshold that decides
Below roughly 800 development hours a year, a full-time employee is mathematically your most expensive option — above it, your best investment.
Most business plans get the cost of an employed developer wrong: on top of the agreed net salary come payroll taxes, holidays, equipment, licences and unproductive time, and the total lands at roughly double the net. For orientation, a mid-senior developer on the Romanian market runs €3,000–9,000 a month fully loaded in 2026 — one reason founders in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands look at nearshore teams before opening a local requisition. Add an invisible cost: recruiting realistically takes 2–4 months, and one employee means one skill set — the strong backend hire will not design your interface or build your mobile app. Outsourcing inverts the equation: you pay an indicative €35–90/h only for hours actually worked, start within days, get access to a complete team — development, design, testing — and stop the engagement when the project ends. The practical threshold: under ~800 hours of work a year → outsource; continuously developing a product that is the business itself → hire at least one in-house person who keeps the know-how, topped up by an external team at the peaks.
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Key takeaways
Where the in-house hire wins
Know-how stays in the company and compounds over time: the person who wrote the system also fixes it in 10 minutes, not in 3 days of re-onboarding. Above 800–1,000 development hours a year, the employee's hourly cost drops below external rates and keeps dropping.
Where outsourcing wins
A start measured in days rather than months of recruiting, and simultaneous access to every competence: architect, developers, designer, tester — profiles you could never hire individually for a single project. When the need ends, the cost ends with it, with no notice periods or severance.
The risk specific to each option
A single employee is a single point of failure: their resignation can freeze your product for months. An external vendor has team continuity, but the know-how accumulates on their side — contract for documentation, full code access and a structured handover, or the dependence becomes pricing leverage.
The hybrid model too many ignore
One internal technical hire — owning the vision, the code and the vendor relationships — plus an external team for execution. You pay one salary instead of five, keep the critical know-how, and scale execution up or down with the budget.
The concrete maths, with indicative market figures
A worked example on a typical case: a distribution business wants a customer ordering portal, estimated at 600 hours in the first year and 150 hours a year thereafter for maintenance and small extensions. The mid-level employee route: indicatively €4,500/month total cost × 12 = €54,000 a year, of which the hire would actually spend only about a third of their time on the portal. The outsourced route at a mid rate of €55/h: 600 × 55 = €33,000 in year one, then around €8,250 a year. The difference pays for the portal a second time over.
Now invert the volume: a SaaS of your own under continuous development, 2,500+ hours a year. Externally, at the same mid rate, that means indicatively €137,500 a year; two in-house developers cover the volume at approximately €100,000 a year in total cost and learn the product in depth with every sprint. Which is why the honest answer is not a camp but a threshold: estimate the real hours over 12 months — we help with that estimate even if you then decide to hire — and only then compare the costs.
When you should NOT outsource to us
If the software is the product itself — a SaaS, a platform the company lives from — we will never recommend complete, open-ended outsourcing, however well it would suit us commercially. Without at least one internal technical person, every architecture decision is taken on trust, and switching vendors becomes a project in its own right. We frequently build exactly this arrangement: we deliver the first year while the client calmly recruits the internal person we hand the baton to.
Signals that you are ready to hire: a steady backlog for 12+ months, a stable budget for a total cost of €3,000–9,000/month, and someone in the company able to assess candidates technically — or an external partner who sits in on the interviews with you. Signals that it is premature: a project with a clear end date, a project budget rather than a salary budget, and zero technical management capacity. Hiring out of frustration with a bad vendor is the most expensive way to fix a contract problem.
Frequently asked questions
Why does an employee cost double the net salary?
Because the net is only part of the picture: in Romania, employer contributions and taxes push total payroll roughly 75% above the net, and holidays, public days off, equipment, licences and administration time add the rest. A net of €2,500 realistically means a total monthly cost around €5,000.
How quickly does each option actually get moving?
A serious external vendor starts analysis within 1–2 weeks of signing. Recruiting a good developer takes 2–4 months — advertising, interviews, notice period at the current employer, onboarding — and for sought-after profiles can pass half a year. If your deadline is this quarter, the decision has already been made for you.
How do I avoid becoming dependent on the outsourcing partner?
Through the contract, from day one: source code pushed to your repository at every delivery, installation and architecture documentation, your own access to servers and accounts, plus an assisted-handover clause on termination. A vendor who hesitates on any of these points has already answered a different question.
Can we start outsourced and hire later?
That is precisely the route we recommend for products of your own: the vendor ships the initial versions, and once the workload stabilises, you hire internally and take over gradually. The condition is that the handover be planned as a paid phase with a period of working in parallel — not as a divorce.
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Let’s talk about your project
Message us on WhatsApp or send an email — you talk directly to a developer.
office@northdan.com · +40 752 070 247