Cost to Hire a Dedicated Development Team in 2024
In these modern, fast-evolving software development landscapes, the tendency is for businesses to develop their digital products in really flexible ways and scale more effectively. The best option to do so is to hire a dedicated developer who can bring all the required skills into your project upon need. How much does it really cost to hire a dedicated development team in 2024?
Considering everything in this article now, let’s detail the influencing factors of cost, starting with the aspects of hiring-from a managed to an unmanaged one-and outline later how to make a right choice for a business.
The Cost of a Dedicated Team: What Influences It
The cost of a dedicated development team has a few variables: what comprises the team, the specific needs of your project, and whether you take a managed or unmanaged approach. Since various members are needed for different parts in software development at different stages of the project, the cost also changes with the movement of the project through the stages.
It depends at what stage of development you are at: building your MVP, scaling the application, or developing the core of your application. All of these steps will be differently priced because different compositions of specialists would be involved, as well as their engagement.
Managed Dedicated Development Team Cost
A managed dedicated development team is a full-service solution composed by your development partner for your specific needs. It covers either starting from scratch or scaling an existing product, depending on the current stage of your project.
Building an MVP
Anyway, if one is planning to hire a dedicated team for MVP development, the importance of development speed against cost and quality is seen in a more balanced manner. The regular structure of a managed dedicated development team for MVP development includes:
Part-time Project Manager: Keeps all on track for the effective communication of stakeholders along with a team.
UI/UX Designer: A person who designs intuitive models for the end-to-end user experience.
Frontend Developer: He is concerned with the part of the product the user will see, making it responsive and good-looking.
Backend Developer: Responsible for server-side logic, database, and application integration.
QA Engineer Part-time: Ensures that the product is stable and there are no big bugs.
DevOps Engineer: In charge of deployment, continuous integration, and smooth operation.
Considering an MVP, the minimum budget required to hire dedicated developers starts from $20,000 per month. In this approach, it works for you to confirm your idea in the market pretty fast by getting the core components of your software developed with speed and low cost.
Scaling the Application
Scaling your application mainly consists of adding new features, optimizing the infrastructure, and making sure your product is capable of handling the growing demand. In general, this is a much heavier and more complex stage. The team for hiring required is larger and usually includes:
Project Manager (part-time): He oversees the progress and goals of the project with the development team.
Business Analyst: The definition and refinement of the requirements to maintain scalability in conformity with the business objectives.
UI/UX Designer: Part-time, keeps perfecting and enhancing the user experience, as it’s continuously updated.
Software Architect: provides the technical basis upon which will rest a system that should be scalable, robust, and maintainable.
The front-end developer now implements the application’s user interface, which means continuous development, including the addition of features.
Full-time back-end developers increase development speed, thus implementing features and improvements faster.
QA Engineer: It ensures that new features are really tested well for their release.
DevOps Engineer: Part-time position supporting deployment, continuous integration, and scalability.
That means that from the scaling point of view, such a budget of a managed dedicated development team would start from about $60,000 per month. The extra specialists just cope better with scaling complication where speed and reliability become important.
Dedicated Unmanaged Team Cost
All that is required from hired dedicated developers in unmanaged teams is a cost limited to how many developers one will hire, their expertise, and one’s needs. Among such facilities that come along with the unmanaged approach is the capability to hire dedicated software developers on either an hourly or monthly basis.
Speaking about some approximate prices of hiring a dedicated developer on unmanaged conditions, the final price will directly depend on his set of skills, years of experience, and geographic location. In this case, the approximate average rate to hire a dedicated developer is $8,400/mo. considering a 40-hour workweek. Thus, depending on what specialists you need and how many hours are required for work on the project, the final price of the unmanaged dedicated team will differ.
Why outsource with an unmanaged team?
When necessary, an unmanaged dedicated team will suffice.
You have all the project management resources of the organization, managing the day-to-day activities, guiding the developers.
You want to be in full control of the team composition and personally approve each specialist that will take part in the work.
You want flexibility with scaling up or down with the number of developers required, as project needs are bound to fluctuate any moment.
While the unmanaged approach gives you greater leeway in that it allows you to manage and control, it also involves more inner resources to manage the team productively. That would be perfect for companies that do have some technical expertise but just require extra help from dedicated developers.
Managed vs. Unmanaged Dedicated Team: Which One to Choose?
The decision between the different options of managed dedicated development teams and unmanaged dedicated teams would depend greatly upon your capability for managing the project internally, budget, and how much support you will require.
This saves lots of hassle because, with managed dedicated development teams, you will not need to bother with the management of the team; this is your development partner’s job. They will take care of everything, starting from talent hiring right up to maintaining daily operations. Although a bit more expensive, it ensures efficiency and speed with lower risk for the project.
Unmanaged DDT means there is more flexibility and control since you can hire the needed amount of dedicated software developers that best suit your specific needs of the project and manage them in-house. It is usually significantly cheaper because you will not have a management fee on top. Unfortunately, it requires substantial internal project management competencies and resources.
Other Factors Affecting the Cost of Hiring a Dedicated Developer
Among the factors that may influence the price of hiring a dedicated team, one would want to mention the choice of a team: managed or unmanaged.
Geographical location: The cost of hiring a dedicated developer depends much on the geographical location from which they are hired. Developers from North America charge significantly higher compared to their peers from Eastern Europe or Asia. Hiring a developer from low-cost locations hence economizes quite a lot of your total budget in the making of the project.
Tech Stack: The kind of technology that is going to be used for the project is another factor. If you need dedicated developers with experience in AI, blockchain, or other emergent technologies, then be prepared for much higher rates compared to finding talented developers in mainstream technology stacks.
Project Duration: Projects with longer durations might be cheaper because the development partners may offer some discount for long-term contracts. For short-term projects, hiring dedicated developers could be more expensive per hour because the availability of the talent needs to be adjusted for shorter spans of time.
Specialist requirements: Another budget point that will be touched by the volume and profile of the necessary specialists. Needless to say, senior developers, software architects, or any other niche experts cost more than hiring junior developers or generalists.
Conclusion
Outsourcing a dedicated development team in 2024 will definitely build your capability to develop software more flexibly and at scale. The cost of recruiting a dedicated team will depend either on the kind of team you want to work with-managed or unmanaged-or what the needs of your project will come up to be. With a managed dedicated team, one can kick-start a product at an estimate of US$20,000 per month for a startup or MVP on business development. We can scale it up to about US$60,000, considering that one needs more specialists for that. We offer an unmanaged variant for those who want a bit more control over the dedicated developers, starting from about US$8,400 per month per developer.
