If you have a tech lead who can direct more engineers, staff augmentation is usually the fastest and most flexible option: our engineers start from €45 an hour (mid-level) or €60 (senior). If you need a defined product built and don’t want to manage the engineering, outsource the project. If you need something operated to agreed service levels, buy managed services. And if you have an ongoing roadmap but no one to run an engineering team, a fixed-price monthly team is often the better fit.
The four models answer different questions. The expensive mistake is picking one for its price per hour when the real constraint is who will own the architecture and the day-to-day decisions.
What are the four engagement models?
Staff augmentation means external engineers join your team, attend your standups, take tasks from your backlog and follow your code review and release process. You keep product ownership and architecture.
Project outsourcing means a partner takes responsibility for delivering a defined scope, such as a new platform, an app or a migration, usually at a fixed price or on time and materials.
Managed services means a partner runs a defined function for you, such as monitoring, patching, backups or a CI/CD platform, against service levels (SLAs: response and resolution times written into the contract).
A Delivery Pod is our name for a team at a fixed monthly price. You set the priorities; the pod plans, builds, tests and releases, and a senior engineer is responsible for architecture and code quality.
How do they compare?
| Staff augmentation | Project outsourcing | Managed services | Delivery Pod | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Engineering time inside your team | A defined outcome | A function kept running | A team’s monthly capacity across your roadmap |
| Who manages the work | You | The partner | The partner | The partner, against your priorities |
| Who owns architecture | You | The partner, with your sign-off | The partner, inside the service boundary | The pod’s senior engineer, with you |
| Pricing unit | Per hour or month, per person | Per project (fixed or time and materials) | Monthly fee tied to scope and SLAs | Fixed price per month |
| Changing priorities | Easy: you re-plan the backlog | Change requests and re-pricing | Out of scope unless contracted | Easy: re-planned every month |
| Best for | Teams with strong technical leadership that need capacity or a skill | Standalone builds with clear requirements | Operations that must not depend on your team’s calendar | Ongoing product work without an in-house engineering manager |
| Our version | From €45/h mid-level, €60/h senior | Typically €30,000–150,000, fixed price after discovery | Care Lite, €4,200/month (maintenance, no new features) | €8,200, €14,000 or €23,000 per month |
When should you choose staff augmentation?
Choose augmentation when you already have a CTO, tech lead or principal engineer who can define the architecture, review code and keep priorities clear, and the bottleneck is hands on keyboards or a specific skill your team lacks, such as cloud infrastructure, performance work or a framework migration.
The advantage is control. Your team sets direction and coding standards, and the augmented engineers work in your tools and your process. It also scales in both directions: you can add an engineer for a quarter without a recruitment process, and stop when the push is over.
The hidden cost is management time. Someone on your side has to onboard the engineers, answer questions, review pull requests and keep them on the right problems. If nobody has that time, you pay senior rates and get mid-level outcomes. Plan for it, especially in the first weeks.
Our engineers work from Ukraine, and your contract is with our Swedish company. You see each engineer’s level and experience before they start, they are typically in place within one to two weeks, and the first two weeks are a fit period: if it isn’t the right fit, we replace them at no cost, or you stop and don’t pay for those two weeks. The details are on our staff augmentation page, and the staff augmentation pricing guide compares the rates with a Swedish in-house hire.
When is project outsourcing the better choice?
Outsourcing fits when you don’t have an internal engineering team, or the team you have is busy with the core product, and you need something delivered end to end: architecture, build, testing and deployment. It works best for standalone projects with a clear finish line.
The hidden cost is communication friction. When the team building the product sits apart from the people who understand the business, requirements get lost in translation and come back as rework. The more the scope moves, the more expensive that becomes, and a fixed price turns into a stream of change requests.
Two habits reduce the risk. First, a short discovery phase before the price is fixed, so the estimate rests on real requirements. Second, a written agreement on what the first sprint must deliver. For our custom software projects, we agree acceptance criteria for the first two-week sprint in writing before we start; if the sprint-1 demo doesn’t meet them, you can stop and you don’t pay for that sprint. How fixed price compares with time and materials is covered in a separate post.
What about managed services?
Managed services are about operating, not building. The partner takes responsibility for a bounded function, such as uptime monitoring, alert handling, security patching, backup and restore, or running a platform, and is measured on response times, restoration targets and monthly reporting.
Choose managed services when:
- you need the function covered to agreed response times, regardless of your own team’s holidays and workload,
- your team lacks depth in a specialty, such as database administration or Kubernetes operations, and you want proven runbooks,
- finance prefers a predictable monthly line for a well-defined function,
- you are willing to standardize on the partner’s tooling inside the service boundary.
The trade-off is flexibility. A good managed-services partner pushes back on ad-hoc exceptions, because exceptions undermine reliability. The common failure is fuzzy scope: SLAs that don’t match reality, or “out of scope” exclusions you discover during an incident. Read the boundary carefully, and make sure the data processing agreement and sub-processor list cover the logs and metadata the partner will see.
Our closest offer is Care Lite at €4,200 a month: security and dependency updates, monitoring, small fixes and a monthly release, with a senior engineer reviewing every change. It deliberately includes no new features.
What is a Delivery Pod, and when does it fit?
A Delivery Pod sits between augmentation and outsourcing. Like augmentation, it’s ongoing capacity that follows your priorities month to month. Like outsourcing, the team manages its own engineering: planning, code review, testing and releases, with a senior engineer accountable for architecture and quality.
It fits companies with a live product and a steady roadmap but no engineering manager, or with a small in-house team that shouldn’t spend its time managing contractors. Our pods:
| Pod | Price per month | Team | Minimum term |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start Pod | €8,200 | 1 mid-level developer, part-time senior oversight and review | 1 month |
| Scale Pod | €14,000 | 1 senior and 1 mid-level developer, shared delivery manager | 1 month |
| Build Pod | €23,000 | 2 senior and 1 mid-level developer, dedicated delivery lead | 3 months |
After the minimum term, every pod runs month to month with 30 days’ notice. Exact capacity, release rhythm and response times are on the Delivery Pods pricing page.
Which one when? A decision guide
Answer these five questions in order. The first “yes” usually points to the model.
- Is the job running something, not building it? If you need monitoring, patching or incident response to agreed times, look at managed services.
- Is there a clear scope and a finish line? If yes, and nobody internal will lead the engineering, outsource the project at a fixed price after discovery.
- Do you have someone who owns architecture and has time to lead? If yes, and you need more capacity or a missing skill, augment.
- Is the work ongoing, with priorities that change month to month? If yes, and you don’t have that technical lead, use a Delivery Pod.
- None of the above fits cleanly? Combine models, but write down who owns which decision.
A quick test: if you can’t name the person who will say no to a bad architectural shortcut, you’re not ready for pure augmentation.
Can you combine or switch models?
Yes, and mature teams often do. Common patterns:
- Outsource, then augment. A partner builds the first version, you hire a core team, and the partner’s engineers move into that team as augmented capacity.
- Managed platform, augmented product teams. A partner runs the platform (CI/CD, monitoring, backups) while augmented engineers ship features inside your architecture. This only works if the platform side publishes clear interfaces and templates.
- Stabilize, then build. A messy system gets a short stabilization project first, then a pod or augmented engineers take over feature work.
Switching is cheap when you plan for it from day one: code in your repository, infrastructure defined as code in an account you own, decisions written down, and a named person on your side who understands the system. Without that, a model change becomes a rescue project.
What should you check in any partner?
Whatever model you choose, the partner decides the outcome more than the contract type does. Before you sign:
- Meet the engineers who will do the work, not only the sales team.
- Ask where the engineers actually sit and which company and law your contract is with. Some “local” agencies subcontract further, which matters for liability and for who touches your data.
- Ask who owns architecture and code quality on their side, by name.
- Check how they handle personal data: a data processing agreement, where data is hosted, and how access is granted and removed.
- Be wary of rates far below market without an explanation. They usually mean junior profiles, engineers split across many clients, or high turnover.
A good partner asks detailed questions about your situation and is willing to tell you when a cheaper model fits better.
What to do next
If you have a tech lead and need capacity, start with a conversation about the role and see matched profiles on the staff augmentation page. If you need a team that manages itself against your roadmap, compare the pods on the pricing page. If you’re not sure which model fits, tell us about the situation and a founder will give you a straight recommendation, including when it isn’t us.
