Isiahcorreia

Hiring in-house buys you the most control. The people absorb your domain over time, and that accumulated context sits in the building.

The mix of people behind the number changes the arithmetic. An hourly rate says almost nothing on its own: an experienced engineer at a premium rate can be cheaper overall than a pair of junior developers who need heavy code review.

Building your own team delivers long-term retention of knowledge. The people internalise the business domain in a way no external team will match, and that accumulated context remains inside the company.

The paperwork warrants more scrutiny than the proposal. Three sections matter more than the rest: assignment of intellectual property, the NDA, and exit terms and handover.

One last thing, state what you want in the response. Request a breakdown by feature or module, the assumptions behind each number, whatever the team considers risky and a low number and a high number.

Write down the hard constraints. These include the platforms and services involved, the data you have and where it lives, compliance requirements, traffic expectations, supported browsers or devices and stacks you cannot change.

Non-functional requirements quietly rewrite the number. An application used by twenty people is a very different build from the same feature set handling thousands of external customers.

Look first at proven experience, not the length of the client list. Ask to see a couple of projects that sit close to your stack, and then ask specifically whether those engineers are still with the company.