| Managed squad | Hire in-house | Agency | Freelancers | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to start | 2 weeks | 3 to 6 months | 4 to 8 weeks | Days to weeks |
| Minimum commitment | 3 months | Open-ended | 6 to 12 months | Per project |
| Cancellation | 30 days notice | Severance and risk | Contract penalties | End of project |
| Same engineers across sprints | Yes | Yes | Often rotated | No guarantee |
| Owns the code context | After week 4 | After month 2 | Limited | Project only |
| Engineer seniority | Senior, by definition | Whoever you find | Mixed levels | Highly variable |
| Hiring overhead on you | None | 6+ months | None | Per role |
| On-call participation | Optional | Yes | Rare | Almost never |
| Scale up or down | 30 days | 3 to 6 months | Contract-bound | Immediate |
| Public pricing | Yes, 5 currencies | Market rate | Quote on request | Quote on request |
What a managed squad gets you.
Speed of freelancers. Quality of in-house. Flexibility of agency. Without the trade-offs.
Two weeks to first PR. No 6-month hiring funnel.
Same engineers, sprint after sprint. They own the codebase like your own team would.
Scale up, scale down, or stop with 30 days notice. No yearly contracts.
Engineers, not project managers shipping engineers' work to you. The cost you pay is the cost of the team.
Pick the model that fits.
30 minutes. We tell you which model fits your situation. Even if it's not us.
Book the discovery callFour ways to add engineering capacity. The honest comparison: time to start, commitment, who owns the code.