Staff augmentation pricing: rates, total cost and what drives the price

Our staff augmentation rates start at €45 an hour for a mid-level engineer and €60 for a senior. Full-time, that is about €7,500 and €10,000 a month, excluding VAT. The engineers work from Ukraine, and your contract is with Smoother Development AB, a Swedish company, under Swedish law. This guide explains what drives the rate, what an invoice doesn’t show, and how the numbers compare with hiring a developer in Sweden.

Staff augmentation (also called team or resource augmentation) means renting engineers who join your team and work under your tech lead, in your tools and your process. If you are still deciding between that and other models, start with staff augmentation vs outsourcing.

How much does staff augmentation cost?

At our starting rates:

All prices exclude VAT.

The published rates are starting points. The exact rate for a role, for example a lead role or a niche specialty, is in the proposal before you sign. Contracts start from one month, and the first two weeks are a fit period: if the engineer isn’t the right fit, we replace them at no cost, or you stop and don’t pay for those two weeks.

Why are the engineers in Ukraine, and what does that mean for you?

We are a Swedish company with an engineering team in Ukraine. We say it plainly because it should be part of your decision, not a surprise in month three.

What it means in practice:

• You sign with a Swedish limited company under Swedish law, and a founder is accountable for the engagement.
• Personal data is handled under a data processing agreement. Ukraine has no EU adequacy decision, so any access from Ukraine is covered by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses in that agreement. We host in EU regions by default.
• Kyiv is one hour ahead of Stockholm all year, so the working days overlap almost completely.
• The rate reflects the Ukrainian engineering market, not Stockholm salaries. That is how a senior engineer can cost €60 an hour.

Continuity questions are fair, given the war. Every project has a second engineer who knows the codebase, code is pushed to your repository, and the team has worked through power and connectivity disruption since 2022 with backup power and connections. Our nearshore vs offshore guide goes deeper on time zones, law and data protection.

What drives the price of an augmented developer?

Across the market, the same factors move the rate:

1. Seniority. A senior engineer who can make architecture calls and work without close supervision costs more than a mid-level developer who needs direction, and is usually worth it on critical systems.
2. Specialization. Data engineering, security-heavy work, DevOps and niche stacks command more than mainstream web development.
3. Lead responsibilities. Mentoring, architecture reviews and stakeholder communication are extra work, and contracts price them in.
4. Dedication. A full-time engineer on your account costs more per month than someone split across clients, and is far more productive per hour.
5. Commitment length. Longer engagements are cheaper to staff and can earn a better rate.
6. Location of the engineers. Rates follow local salary levels. The same title costs very different amounts in Stockholm, Kyiv, Lisbon or Bangalore.
7. Your requirements. Client-managed laptops, background checks, on-call duty or fixed overlap hours all add cost, so mention them early.

How does it compare with hiring a developer in Sweden?

The fair comparison is cost per worked hour, using public figures. SCB’s salary statistics put the average monthly salary for software and systems developers at 55,500 kr (2024 figures, all experience levels, full-time equivalent). On top of salary, the employer pays employer contributions of 31.42% (arbetsgivaravgifter, the full rate according to Skatteverket).

The SCB figure is an average across all experience levels; senior roles, and Stockholm, usually sit above it.

So the honest answer: augmentation isn’t dramatically cheaper than employment per hour. A mid-level engineer from us costs about the same as the salary and employer contributions of an average Swedish developer, before you add pension, recruitment and equipment to the employee side. A senior costs more than the average employee; next to an experienced senior on a Stockholm salary, with pension and recruitment added, the gap narrows or disappears.

Where augmentation wins is everything around the rate: you can start in one to two weeks instead of months, you avoid a recruitment fee and a hire that might not work out, and you can stop when the push is over. Where hiring wins is long-term core capability. If you will need the role for years and can wait for the right person, hire.

What hidden costs should you budget for?

An augmentation invoice shows hours. It doesn’t show:

• Your management time. Augmented engineers still need a tech lead on your side to onboard them, answer questions and review their work. Budget real hours for it in the first weeks; without it you pay senior rates for mid-level outcomes.
• Access and tooling. Accounts, licenses, CI minutes, staging environments and a security review of the setup are small per person, but not zero.
• Context switching. Moving engineers between unrelated projects every week lowers throughput per hour, even if the hours are billed the same. Give them coherent slices of work.
• Knowledge at exit. When an engagement ends, someone has to own what was built. Plan a handover with documentation, or pay for it later in slower changes.

Augmentation, a Delivery Pod or a project: which costs less?

It depends on who manages the work. With augmentation you pay for engineering hours and supply the management yourself. With a Delivery Pod, a team at a fixed monthly price, the management is included: our Start Pod costs €8,200 a month for up to about 190 hours of team capacity, the Scale Pod €14,000 for about 260 hours and the Build Pod €23,000 for about 420 hours, each with a senior engineer responsible for architecture and code quality. Divided by the included capacity, that is roughly €43–55 an hour with planning, QA and reviews included.

If you have a strong tech lead with time to spare, augmentation is the cheaper route. If you don’t, a pod or a fixed-price project usually costs less in total, even when the invoice looks higher. The Delivery Pods pricing page has the team composition and terms.

Three worked examples

These use our starting rates and exclude VAT.

1. Six-month platform push, one senior full-time. 160 hours a month at €60 for six months is €57,600. Add your tech lead’s time for onboarding and reviews. The alternative, a permanent hire, typically takes months to land and adds a recruitment fee.
2. Two mid-level engineers for nine months. 320 combined hours a month at €45 for nine months is €129,600. That is in the same range as employing two developers for the same period, without the long-term obligation and with a much faster start.
3. A fractional senior. 40 hours a month at €60 is €2,400 a month for architecture guidance and security reviews, which can replace a full-time senior hire you can’t yet fill or justify.

Red flags in a rate card

Dig deeper when you see:

• “Senior” engineers at rates far below the market. It usually means junior profiles with inflated titles, or engineers split across many clients.
• No clear answer on where the engineers sit, or which company employs them. You need to know whose law applies and who touches your data.
• No replacement policy and no trial or fit period.
• Pass-through expenses without caps, or unclear rules on what counts as a billable hour.
• No answer to what happens if your project pauses.

What to do next

If you know the role you need, tell us the stack, the seniority and the hours, and we’ll come back with matched profiles and the exact rate. Rates, engagement models and the fit period are on the staff augmentation page.