Insights · 5 min read
A dedicated development team can cost less than hiring in-house. When it makes sense, what to insist on, and real monthly rates from a 40-engineer shop.
By GGP Editorial
A dedicated development team sounds expensive, and sometimes it is. For a certain kind of project, though, it is the cheapest option you have. I want to explain when that is true and when it is not, because the term gets thrown around loosely.
A dedicated team means the people building your product report to you, join your standups and work only on your backlog. They are employed by a vendor like us, but day to day they behave like your own employees. That is the whole point: you get a team without hiring, payroll or office space.
Hiring is slow. One senior developer takes weeks to find, more weeks to interview, and often three months to become productive. A dedicated team of three to five people can start within two to four weeks and ships from day one. For a company that needs to move now, that lead time alone can justify the model.
Cost is the second reason. A US company paying $140 an hour for a contractor, or $150,000 a year plus benefits for an employee, can get a full dedicated team of four offshore engineers for roughly the same monthly spend. I am not saying the offshore team replaces your local people. The best setups mix them: product and business decisions stay local, and the build capacity comes from the dedicated team.
Access to skills is the third reason. A dedicated team can carry a Vue or React frontend, a Java and Spring Boot backend, and a Go or Node service for the parts that need speed, without you recruiting five different specialists. For a product touching payments or real-time feeds, that mix matters.
Not every vendor who says "dedicated team" delivers one. Three things separate the real deal from a staffing agency with better marketing.
First, the engineers should stay on your account. If the roster changes every month, you are not getting a team, you are getting whoever was free that week. Ask for named engineers and a commitment on continuity.
Second, you want a delivery lead or tech lead included. A team without one will take your instructions but not your goals, and you will spend your evenings writing tickets instead of running your business.
Third, timezone overlap matters more than people admit. A team nine hours away can work, but you need a few hours of overlap for standups and demos. Our teams overlap daily with US and Singapore clients, which is why those markets work well for us. Brazil and parts of Africa sit even closer to our working hours.
Dedicated team pricing is usually monthly, per engineer, and tracks seniority.
| Role | Typical monthly rate, offshore and managed |
|---|---|
| Junior developer | $1,500-2,500 |
| Mid-level developer | $2,500-4,000 |
| Senior developer | $4,000-6,500 |
| Tech lead or architect | $6,000-8,500 |
A three-person squad, one senior plus two mid-level, runs roughly $9,000 to $14,000 a month. Compare that with two in-house hires plus taxes and benefits, and the arithmetic is usually not close.
One advantage nobody talks about enough is elasticity. When we hand a client a dedicated team, it can grow or shrink month to month. A startup that lands a round of funding might go from three engineers to seven inside a month, then trim back once a milestone is done. You cannot do that with employees, not without layoffs and severance, and you can barely do it with contractors.
This is why funded startups in Brazil and the US are our fastest-moving clients. They raise, they scale the dedicated team, they ship, and if the market shifts they scale down. The team absorbs the fluctuation and the roadmap stays intact.
The failures I have seen are almost never about the engineers. They are about the client. Hand a team a vague idea and no product owner, and you will get a vague product. Treat them as an order-taking factory instead of a team that should challenge your assumptions, and you lose the one thing that makes the model worth it.
The clients who get the most from a dedicated team treat it as an extension of their own company: daily standups, a shared roadmap, and honest feedback in both directions. That is how we ran a Brazilian billboard design platform and a lifestyle app for the African market. Both shipped because the client stayed in the loop, not in the weeds.
One more thing to get in writing before you start: own the code. Some vendors hold the source code or charge to release it. You want the repository, the commits and the deploy keys in your name from day one. That is standard at serious shops and a red flag anywhere it is not.
A dedicated team is not for every project. If your scope is small and fixed, a time-and-materials or fixed-price engagement is simpler. But if you have a product to build over six to eighteen months and you do not want to become a full-time recruiter, it is worth pricing out.
Tell us what you are building and where you are today. We will help you define the next step.
