Hire a freelancer when the work has an end date: a website, a first version, or fixing a product that's stuck. Hire a full-time developer once there's a year of steady work and you can spend about $170,000 or more a year in the US. Most small businesses and early startups need the freelancer first.
The question usually comes up when a founder or business owner has a project and assumes the answer is "hire a developer". A salary is a commitment to a year of work, not to one project. So the real question is whether there's a year of work. I'm a freelancer, so read this knowing that, but I'll tell you plainly when full-time is the better choice. Below: what each costs in year one, five questions that decide it, three real situations, how to switch from one to the other, and the risks on both sides.
Full-time developer or freelancer: the short answer
Hire a freelancer when
The job has an end
- The work has a clear end: a website, a first version, a rescue
- You need someone to start in days, not months
- Nobody on your team can manage a developer day to day
- After launch, a few hours a month of support is enough
Hire full-time when
The work never stops
- There's a full week of development work, every week, for a year
- The product changes constantly because customers ask for things
- You can afford about $170,000+ a year for one US developer
- Someone can judge their work and set their priorities
The cut
There's also a third choice people forget: an agency, when you need several people at once, like a designer, two developers, and a project manager. That trade-off is in hiring a freelancer or an agency. This post is about one person, and whether they should be on your payroll.
Full-time developer vs freelancer cost in year one
A salary looks cheaper per hour than a freelance rate. Over a year, it usually isn't, because you pay for every week, busy or not, plus everything on top of the salary.
| Full-time developer | Freelancer | |
|---|---|---|
| Main cost | $135,980 median salary (US, May 2025) | A project price: websites $8,000–22,000, first product $30,000–70,000 |
| On top of that | Taxes and benefits: total cost 1.25–1.4× salary | Nothing. The invoice is the cost |
| Year-one total | About $170,000–190,000, plus recruiting and equipment | The project, plus support from $600 a month |
| Time to start | About 35–45 days to hire, plus notice at their old job | Usually one to three weeks |
| When work runs out | You keep paying | You stop paying |
| Type | Typical range | Real projects |
|---|---|---|
| Full-time developer, US | $170,000–190,000 | — |
| Freelancer: website plus a year of support | $21,000–32,000 | — |
| Freelancer: first version people pay for | $30,000–70,000 | — |
Salary data is from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The 1.25–1.4× rule for total employee cost is the figure the US Small Business Administration uses. Salaries are lower in the UK, Canada, and Australia, but the multiplier and the logic are the same.
A worked example: a business needs a new website and someone to look after it. With a freelancer, that's roughly $14,000 for the site and $600–1,500 a month for support, so $21,000–32,000 in year one. With a full-time developer, it's $170,000 or more, and they run out of website work after two months. My support prices are explained in what website maintenance costs.
Five questions that decide which hire you need
Answer these honestly before you post a job or ask for a quote. If most answers point one way, that's your hire.
- Is there 40 hours of work every week for a year? Not just the launch. Count the months after it. If the list thins out after month three, a salary pays for a lot of quiet weeks.
- Who will manage them? A full-time developer needs someone to set priorities, review work, and unblock them. If nobody on your team can judge code, one employee alone can drift for months before anyone notices.
- Can you afford 18 months of salary? Hiring someone and letting them go six months later is expensive and painful. If the money only covers the project, pay for the project.
- Is it one skill or several? A product may need web, mobile, AI, and hosting work. One hire rarely covers all of it. A freelancer is chosen for the skill this project needs.
- How soon do you need to start? Hiring takes one to two months before day one. A freelancer can usually start within a few weeks.
Three real situations and the right hire
These are from my own projects. Each client could have tried to hire someone full-time. Only the last one looked like full-time work.
A business website: freelancer, then support
Easy Pawsy, a veterinary clinic, needed a new website with online booking. It took six weeks and cost $14,000. Bookings went from about 20 to 120 a week. After launch, the site needs a few hours a month, not a person. A full-time developer would have cost more in the first month than the whole project.
One well-defined tool: a freelancer for a few weeks
A sales technology company needed a Chrome extension that pulls prospect details from LinkedIn and Salesforce into their workflows. The scope was clear, so I built it in three weeks for $10,000. Each prospect now takes reps about 5 seconds instead of 2 minutes. Hiring an employee for it would have taken longer than the job itself, and left them with a developer and nothing next on the list.
A platform that keeps changing: long-term help, closer to full-time
A confidential B2B sales and gifting platformI worked on is different. I worked in their team of 14 for 30 weeks, owning core systems that changed as customers used them. That's the pattern that justifies full-time developers: a product with users, a roadmap that doesn't end, and a team to manage the work. If you're at that stage, full-time developers make sense, and a freelancer becomes one way to add a skill the team doesn't have yet.
Start with a freelancer, then hire full-time
For most startups, the answer isn't one or the other. It's both, in order. A freelancer builds the first version while you find out whether customers want it. Once they do, and there's a steady list of work, you hire someone full-time to carry it forward. This keeps the salary off your books until there's a product and revenue to justify it.
The switch goes smoothly if you plan it from the start:
- Own everything.Code, hosting, domain, and every service account sit in your company's name from day one.
- Use common tools.Ask the freelancer to build with technology that's easy to hire for later, not a niche favourite.
- Get it written down. How to run it, how to deploy it, and why key decisions were made.
- Overlap for a few weeks. The freelancer walks the new hire through the code and stays available for questions.
- Use the freelancer in the interview. A developer who knows the code can tell you whether a candidate does too.
Risks of each and how to reduce them
Neither choice is safe by default. Each has its own way of going wrong, and each has a fix.
Hiring a freelancer
The main risks are availability and dependence. A freelancer has other clients, so they may not answer at midnight, and if they disappear, knowledge leaves with them. Reduce this with a written scope, agreed response times, accounts in your name, and documentation as part of the job. Check their past work and ask their clients how it went. The questions to ask before hiring a freelancer cover this in detail.
Hiring full-time
The main risk is a wrong hire. If you can't judge code, you can't easily tell a strong developer from a confident one, and a bad hire costs months of salary plus the work that has to be redone. Reduce this by getting a technical person to help interview, starting with a paid trial project, and setting clear goals for the first 90 days. If what you really need is senior technical judgment rather than someone to build, compare a fractional CTO and a freelance developer.
Hiring mistakes that cost the most
These are the patterns I see most when founders and business owners tell me how their last developer hire went.
- A salary for a project. Hiring full-time to build a website, then paying for months with little to do.
- A junior developer alone.Hiring cheap to save money, with no senior person to review the work. The product works until it doesn't, and the fix costs more than the savings.
- A freelancer with no end date.Paying by the hour with no written scope, so the project never finishes and nobody can say what "done" looks like.
- A title before a product.Hiring a "head of engineering" when nobody has built anything yet. Hire the person who builds, and add the title once there's a team to lead.
- Equity instead of pay for a short job. Offering shares to a freelancer for a fixed project. More on that in paying a developer in equity or cash.
What to write down before you hire anyone
Whichever way you go, write these answers down first. They make a job post clearer and a freelance quote more accurate, and they often answer the full-time question on their own.
If months 3, 6, and 12 are empty, you need a project, not an employee. If they're already full, start hiring now. You can see the kinds of projects I take on in what I build. Or send me your answers, and I'll tell you which hire fits and what the first step would cost.
Sources
- Software developers: median pay, May 2025, US Bureau of Labor Statistics
- How much does an employee cost you? (1.25–1.4× salary), US Small Business Administration
- Average time to hire a software engineer, Paraform
- Independent contractor (self-employed) or employee?, IRS
