Freelancer or software house, honestly

Most of the work we lose, we lose to a freelancer. Usually on price, occasionally on speed, and more often than we would like to admit, the client was right to go that way.

So this is a software house making the case for the other option, at least some of the time. Read it with that bias in mind, and read the section where we argue for ourselves with the same suspicion.

The short version. Hire one developer when the work is finite, well defined, and you could describe it on a single page. Hire a firm when the thing has to keep running afterwards, when it needs more than one skill, or when the cost of it breaking is larger than the cost of building it.

Where a freelancer is genuinely the better answer

A brochure site for a business that already knows what it wants to say. A landing page for one campaign. A WordPress theme customised to a brand. A fix to something that already exists. A small feature added to a codebase somebody else built.

In all of those the scope is legible, the work is one discipline, and there is no ongoing obligation once it ships. You are buying a finished object, not a relationship. A firm will quote higher for the same object because a firm has overheads a freelancer does not, and you would be paying for a process the job does not need.

There is a speed argument too. A freelancer can start on Tuesday. A firm will want a discovery conversation, then a scope document, then a slot in a schedule. For a two-week job that overhead is a meaningful share of the total.

Where it goes wrong, and it is usually the same way

Not on quality. Good freelancers write better code than mediocre firms, and there are very good freelancers in Pakistan.

It goes wrong on continuity. One person is one person. They take a full-time job, they move abroad, their laptop dies, they get ill, they stop replying. None of that is bad faith and all of it is common. When it happens mid-project you are holding a half-finished codebase you cannot read, and the next developer will quote more to finish it than the first quoted to build it, because inheriting an unfinished system is worse than starting one.

The same risk applies after launch, and lasts longer. A site built in March needs a security update in September. If the person who built it has moved on, that update does not happen, and you find out when something breaks or when a browser starts warning visitors away.

Ask the continuity question before you sign, not after. What happens if you are unavailable for a month? Who else can pick this up? A freelancer with a good answer, a documented handover, a named colleague who could take over, is a much safer bet than one who has not thought about it.

Where a firm earns the difference

Three things, and they are all about after.

More than one skill in the room. A store needs a frontend, a database, a payment integration, an admin system somebody non-technical can run, and images that load on a phone in Quetta on a bad connection. That is four or five specialisms. One person can do all of them, but rarely all of them well, and the weakest one is the one that fails in production.

Somebody still answering in a year. This is the whole of it, really. A company has a phone number that survives one person leaving.

Accountability with a name and an address. If a firm ships something broken, you know where they are. That matters more in Pakistan than in markets with cheap small-claims processes, because your practical recourse against a solo contractor who stops replying is close to nil.

What a firm charges for that a freelancer does not

Be clear-eyed about this. Part of the gap is real value: review, testing, a second opinion on architecture, someone available when the first person is not. Part of it is overhead you are funding: office, salaries between projects, the cost of the deal itself.

Anyone telling you the entire gap is value is selling. The honest framing is that you are buying insurance, and like any insurance it is a bad deal right up until the moment it is not.

The Pakistani specifics that change the maths

Payment and recourse. A local freelancer paid by bank transfer or Easypaisa leaves you with a receipt and goodwill. A registered company can be checked against SECP, and a PSEB registration is verifiable against a register neither of you controls. If the project is large enough that a dispute would hurt, that verifiability is worth real money.

Who holds your domain. This is the one we see cause the most damage and it applies to both options. Whoever registers the domain controls it, and a .pk domain renewal at PKNIC is less forgiving than a .com at an international registrar. Insist that the registrar account is in your name and your email from day one, whoever builds the site.

Working hours and power. A solo developer running on a single connection through load shedding has no redundancy. A team has some. This is not theoretical here.

The overseas comparison. If you are considering an offshore freelancer through a marketplace, note that you get the freelancer risk profile plus a timezone gap plus no realistic recourse. That is the weakest combination of the three.

How to de-risk either choice

The same five things protect you regardless of who you hire, and there is a longer list of questions once you get to a shortlist.

1. Get the five accounts in your own name: domain registrar, DNS, hosting, code repository, database. Not their agency account with you added. Yours.
2. Ask to see something they built that is still running, and check that it still works. A portfolio screenshot proves nothing. A live URL proves a lot.
3. Get the price as a breakdown, not a single figure. What is the build, what is hosting, what is maintenance, what is extra.
4. Ask what happens after launch, in writing, with a number attached. "We will support you" is not an arrangement.
5. Ask what is not included. The answer tells you more than the quote does.

Any freelancer or firm that finds these questions unreasonable has told you something useful for free.

Our position, stated plainly

We lose deals to freelancers and we frequently should. If you need a five-page site and you have a good developer's number, call them. We will tell you the same thing on the phone, and we have.

Where we think a firm is worth the difference is when the thing has to still be working in two years, when it touches money, or when nobody in your business could pick up the pieces if the builder disappeared. That is a narrower set of projects than our own website implies, and we would rather say so than take work that would have been cheaper and better done by one person.

Talk to us

If you are weighing this up and want a straight answer about which side your project falls on, describe it to us. If a freelancer is the better call we will say so, which costs us a proposal and saves you money.