Why Hiring a Solo Developer Can Save Your Startup Thousands

The hidden costs of agencies — and why a solo developer might be your best bet.

When you're building your first product, every dollar counts. Most startups default to hiring an agency or assembling a full team, but there's a third option that's often overlooked: working with a single, experienced full-stack developer. Let me explain why this approach can save you thousands while actually delivering better results.

The Agency Overhead Problem

Agencies charge premium rates — and a significant portion of that goes to overhead: project managers, account managers, office space, and internal processes. When you hire an agency, you're not just paying for development time. You're funding their organizational structure. A typical agency might bill $150-300/hour, but only $40-80 of that reaches the developer actually writing your code.

Direct Communication = Faster Shipping

With a solo developer, there's no game of telephone. You describe what you need, and the person building it hears you directly. This eliminates an entire category of bugs and delays that come from miscommunication through layers of project management. Feature requests, bug reports, and pivots happen in real-time — not through a ticketing system with a 48-hour SLA.

Photo by Andrew Kliatskyi on Unsplash.

One Brain, Zero Context Switching

When a solo developer works on your project, they hold the entire codebase in their head. There's no knowledge transfer between team members, no onboarding new developers mid-sprint, and no inconsistencies between how different engineers interpret the same requirements. The result is a more coherent, well-architected product.

When Does This Work Best?

The solo dev approach is ideal for MVPs, early-stage products, and projects where speed and cost matter more than having a 20-person team. If you're pre-seed or bootstrapped, a solo developer can be the difference between launching in 2 months versus 6. And that time-to-market advantage is often worth more than any feature you could add.