How much does a development squad cost in 2026?

From $12,000 to $22,000 a month, depending on team composition. That is the pricing Revin publishes on its site. Here I open up the math: what goes into a managed squad monthly fee, what the market charges in 2026, and the three questions that deflate a padded proposal.

A squad of three engineers starts at $12,000 a month at Revin. Five engineers with a dedicated tech lead, $22,000. That is not a teaser rate or a lead magnet: it is the table published on our pricing page, team composition sitting right next to it.

I am writing this because the same scene keeps playing out. A founder googles what a development squad costs, reads half a dozen articles that spend eight hundred words saying "it depends", and lands on a contact form. The real number shows up later, in a sales call, tailored. Tailored to the size of your budget, that is.

This article is the open math before the sales call: what goes into a managed squad price, the ranges vendors actually charge, and the questions that separate a serious proposal from a padded one.

When pricing is public, the sales conversation starts in the right place

Why almost nobody publishes pricing

The short answer: hiding the number is profitable. A closed proposal lets a vendor price the client, not the work. Last year a logistics founder showed me the three proposals he had received for the same scope, same brief, same discovery call. The cheapest came in at $9,400 a month. The most expensive, $27,500. None of the three said who would actually do the work or how senior they were.

When a vendor publishes pricing, that game is over. Revin publishes because we run managed squads as a product, not as bespoke projects: floors on the site, real ranges, a custom quote only when the work genuinely falls outside the standard. Do we give up anchoring margin? Sure. We also get conversations that start in the right place.

What the monthly fee actually covers

A managed squad is not a sum of salaries. The monthly fee covers the team (a senior and two mid-levels on Starter; a tech lead, two seniors and two mid-levels on Standard), but mostly it covers what makes that team run without you becoming its project manager:

• Technical leadership: architecture, stack decisions, and code review that is not a rubber stamp.
• Delivery rituals: standups, sprint planning, and a weekly report you can read in five minutes.
• QA and documentation built into the flow, not sold as a separate "phase".
• Replacing people at no extra cost: if someone leaves the squad, that is our problem.

In a classic bodyshop, every item on that list becomes a new line on the invoice. Or, worse, it quietly does not exist, and you find out in month three when you ask who has been reviewing the code.

The cost that never shows up in the proposal is usually what settles the bill

What the market charges in 2026

The nearshore guides that rank on Google quote anywhere from $8,000 to $30,000 a month for squads of four to six people, with senior rates in Latin America running $35 to $99 an hour depending on who you ask. Read those numbers with some skepticism: nearly all of them come from vendors who will not show their own price. Mine is a vendor number too, I will admit. The difference is that it is published, composition included, and you do not need a call to check it.

What moves the price inside that range is less mysterious than it looks: average seniority, dedicated versus shared tech lead, contract minimums, and how much management is baked in. A $10,000 squad advertised as five seniors probably has two mid-levels and someone whose badge is still warm. The full Revin table, plan by plan, is at revin.com.br/en/pricing.

For calibration against hiring: three senior engineers in the US run about $45,000 a month fully loaded, before you count the three to five months of recruiting. That gap is why a Brazil-based squad works even for companies that already have in-house engineering: overlapping working hours with the US, and capacity that arrives already functioning.

Three questions that deflate a padded proposal

If you have proposals on the table right now, three questions settle most of the evaluation. They are the same ones I ask when Revin loses a deal and I want to understand who we lost to.

1. Who, by name and seniority, will work on my product?

A serious proposal answers with people. A padded one answers with "our team of experts". If the vendor cannot say who, the price has no backing.

2. How much of the fee is engineering and how much is management?

There is no correct ratio, only a transparent one. Management baked into the fee is healthy when it shows up in the composition. When it shows up nowhere, it is usually hiding inside the hourly rate of the people writing code.

3. What happens if I want out?

Thirty days notice is the standard of a vendor that trusts its own delivery. A six-month termination fee is the standard of one that knows you will want to leave. And if the real doubt is the state of your codebase before you sign anything, a two-week Diagnostic Sprint maps code, delivery, and team for a fixed fee: revin.com.br/en/diagnostic-sprint.

The price that never shows up in a proposal

In 2024 I watched a fintech switch to the cheapest vendor in the running and save $5,200 a month for four months. In month five, they paid $7,800 in rework to redo a payments integration that had been delivered as "done". The spreadsheet savings did not survive the first production incident.

Squad pricing is compared on open composition, exit terms, and someone answering for delivery. We can run that math together in a 30-minute call, no strings attached: revin.com.br/en/discovery-call. And if you want to see what it turns into, the case studies are at revin.com.br/en/cases.