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Carew vs an in-house development team
Hiring developers gives you a team that knows the business from the inside. Bringing in Carew gets a defined system built for one fixed price, without salaries to keep busy once it is finished.
The short answer
Hire in-house if software is the product you sell, or if you have a steady flow of development work for years ahead. A team that lives with the code every day is worth its fixed cost.
Use Carew if you need one system, or a few, built properly and then changed now and then. You know the price before work starts, and you are not paying for capacity you do not use.
Side by side
| Area | Carew | An in-house team |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | One fixed price for each piece of work | Salaries, employer's National Insurance, pensions, equipment and recruitment fees, paid whether or not there is work |
| Time to start | A written plan and price within one to two days of a first call | Recruitment and onboarding before useful work begins |
| Skills | Design, build, data and integrations from one team | Depends on who you hire. One developer rarely covers all of it |
| Knowledge of your business | Learned during the project and written into the plan | Builds up over time and stays in the building |
| Changes after launch | Each change agreed and priced before it is made | Made whenever the team has capacity |
| Risk of overrun | Carried by us. The price is agreed up front | Paid for in salary time |
| Ownership | You own the custom code once paid | You own the code |
Costs for an in-house team vary with seniority, location and how many people you hire.
When an in-house team is the better choice
If your software is your product, you need people who work on it every day and answer for it. The same applies if you have more development work than one project, every month, for the foreseeable future. A permanent team then pays for itself, and its knowledge of the business compounds.
When Carew is the better choice
Most operating businesses need a system built and then adjusted occasionally. A permanent hire for that is hard to keep busy and hard to replace if they leave, and a single developer is unlikely to be equally good at design, data and integrations.
With Carew, the scope and price are fixed before any work starts, so the decision is a known cost against a known result. If you later want your own team, the code is yours to hand over.
Questions
Can Carew work alongside our own developers?
Yes. We can build a defined part of the system while your team works on the rest, and the code is yours at the end.
How much does a project cost?
It depends on what the system needs to do. You get one fixed price in writing before any work starts, usually within two days of the first call.
What if we want to bring it in-house later?
The custom code belongs to you, so your own developers can take it over whenever you are ready.
Who owns the software?
You do, once it is paid for. The custom code we write for you is yours, as set out in our terms.
Tell us what the team does by hand.
We'll say whether we can help and what it would cost. The first call takes 30 minutes.
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