How to buy
Freelancer, agency, studio or in-house?
We're a studio, so treat what follows with appropriate suspicion — and then check it against your own experience, because we've tried to write the version we'd want to read. Each of these options is genuinely the right answer for some projects and genuinely the wrong one for others, and the deciding factor is usually risk rather than price.
Rather just ask someone? Talk to usIn short
Freelancers are cheapest and most personal but are a single point of failure. Agencies offer depth and process at a premium, though you may never meet the builders. Studios sit between the two — senior people who both sell and do the work. In-house only makes sense once software is continuous, not a project.
What actually matters
Price differences are mostly overheads and risk
An agency's higher rate buys project management, cover when someone is sick, and a business that will still exist next year. Whether that's worth it depends on how much the project's failure would cost you.
The single-point-of-failure question is the important one
Ask yourself honestly what happens to your business if this person becomes unavailable for three months. If the answer is 'not much', hire the freelancer. If the answer is serious, buy the redundancy.
In larger agencies you rarely meet the builders
That's not dishonest, it's how they scale. But it does mean the person who understood your business in the meeting may not be the one making decisions in the code. Ask who's actually assigned.
In-house is a commitment to continuous work
A developer on salary is excellent value if there's a full-time queue of work. If there isn't, you've bought expensive idle time and a single person's opinions with no counterweight.
You can mix them, and most people should
A studio or agency builds it, a freelancer handles small changes, an in-house hire arrives when the work becomes continuous. Treating this as a permanent identity choice is the mistake.
Whoever you choose, own your accounts
Domain, hosting, repository and analytics in your business's name. This matters most with freelancers, purely because a solo operator's life can change faster than a company's.
The honest comparison
Typical rather than universal — there are excellent agencies and dreadful freelancers, and vice versa.
| Criteria | Freelancer | Studio | Agency | In-house |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Typical cost | $70 – $150 / hr | Fixed price or retainer | $180 – $350 / hr | $110k – $180k / yr each |
| Who does the work | The person you hired | The people you met | Often not who you met | Your employee |
| Breadth of skill | One person's range | Small senior team | Full team, all disciplines | Whoever you hired |
| If they're unavailable | Everything stops | Someone covers | Someone covers | Everything stops |
| Continuity | Depends entirely on them | Good | Good, staff turnover aside | Until they resign |
| Best for | Small, well-defined jobs | Custom work needing judgement | Large, multi-discipline programmes | Continuous product work |
| Main risk | They disappear | Limited capacity | Cost, and layers between you and the work | Cost, and one person's blind spots |
Where we'd tell you otherwise
For a straightforward five-page site with a clear brief, a good freelancer will do it as well as we would and charge you less, and you should hire them. We're worth the difference when the work needs judgement rather than execution — when what to build is as uncertain as how to build it.
Want a second opinion?
Tell us what you're weighing up. We'll give you a straight answer, including when the answer is that you don't need us.
Common questions
Per hour, almost always — typically $70 to $150 against $180 to $350. Per outcome it's less clear: agencies carry cover, process and accountability that reduce the chance of the project stalling. For small, well-defined work the freelancer is usually better value.
A small agency where the people who sell the work are also the people who do it. You get senior attention and no handover to an unknown production team, in exchange for less capacity than a large agency can offer.
When there is genuinely full-time work for the foreseeable future, and the software is core enough that you want the knowledge inside the business. Below that threshold you're paying a salary for idle time and inheriting one person's blind spots.
Own every account yourself, insist the code lives in your repository from day one, pay against milestones rather than up front, keep the scope written down, and make sure a second person could pick it up. Most freelancer horror stories are access problems rather than skill problems.
Also worth a look
- How to Choose a Web Developer in Australia
- Offshore or Australian Developers?
- What a Website Actually Costs in Australia (2026)
- Already built something that's stuck? We fix those
Last reviewed . Prices are indicative Australian ranges, not quotes.