We are an agency, so read this accordingly. It includes the cases where hiring beats engaging us, because those cases are real and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's time.
All Comparisons →
| Criterion | Hire in-house | Engage an agency | Fractional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to start productive work | 3–6 months | 1–2 weeks | 1–2 weeks |
| Annual cost (senior, EU) | €120–180k loaded | Per project | €4–9k per month |
| Domain knowledge accrual | Deep, permanent | Partial, transferred | Good, ongoing |
| Breadth of experience | One person's history | Many projects | Many projects |
| Availability | Full time | Project duration | Agreed days |
| Risk if they leave | Significant | Contractual handover | Contractual handover |
| Can you evaluate them? | Hard without AI expertise | Judge by delivered work | Judge by delivered work |
| Scales down | No | Yes | Yes |
The pattern we see work best: engage for the first system, pair your engineers alongside, and hire once the ongoing workload is clearly full-time. You get speed now and capability permanently, and the hire arrives into a codebase your team already understands.
Higher day rate, far lower total commitment. On our own unsourced 2026 estimate a senior AI engineer in Western Europe runs €120–180k fully loaded, plus three to six months of unproductive search. A bounded engagement runs from around €8–25k for a prototype sprint to €30–120k for a production build — the ranges published on our pricing page — and delivers in weeks. Past sustained full-time demand the employee is clearly cheaper, and that crossover is the real decision point rather than the day rate comparison.
Insist on it contractually and check it is happening: code in your repositories from day one, infrastructure as code in your accounts, documented architectural decisions, and your engineers pairing on the work. Any agency resisting those terms is optimising for lock-in — that is a reason to walk, and it applies to us as much as anyone.
That is usually the strongest arrangement. Agency for the initial architecture and the first system; your team learning alongside; a permanent hire when the workload justifies it, arriving into something already built and documented. It costs slightly more than either alone and removes the biggest risk in both.
Good — that is the intended trajectory. We fold them in, transfer context deliberately, and scale our involvement down as they ramp. An agency that treats a client hire as a threat has the wrong business model.
If it looks like a permanent role, we will say so.
30-minute call · no deck
What we built, what stage it is at, and a link to the live thing wherever there is one.
yourOS is an operating system with an AI at its heart. You talk to it like a person, out loud or typed. It makes your calls, plans your days and works on your projects with a crew of agents, on your own private server. Our own product, built from the first commit; the waitlist is open.
Website, backend and app assets for Sonora, a free AI sound-therapy app on iOS and Android published by Cognitive AI.
Brand, website, prototype, apps on five platforms, the AI backend and the algorithm-intelligence pipeline for Podswap, a social growth engine that runs without a human in the loop.
In closed beta: Roxy, a private AI assistant with permanent memory running on infrastructure the user owns. Brand, site, product, backend and conversational design.
Live at coherence.com: brand identity generated with AI agents we directed, the motion system and website for the group behind Sonora, AboutAI, WakeUp and MudShadows. Agent work remains in build.
Live at domainbooth.com for DomainBooth, a premium domain brokerage: a new animated mark, every page redesigned and rebuilt with designed mobile layouts, and a custom CMS for its sales record, featured names, press and enquiries.
Apps, platforms and campaigns for these teams, long before the AI work. Every one is written up on the work page — what we did, and where our part ended.
