how wlcm compares

The honest comparison.

Freelancers, offshore shops, in-house hires, or a senior studio — every route can work. Here’s the trade-off math we’d share with a friend.

Freelancers

  • Lowest hourly cost and quick to start
  • One person = one skill set; design, backend, QA, and PM rarely come together
  • Availability and continuity are the risk — your product outlives the engagement
  • Good for: small, well-defined tasks

Offshore dev shops

  • Attractive rates and big teams
  • Quality varies wildly; you often discover it at handoff
  • Sub-contracting and rotation mean the team that starts is rarely the team that finishes
  • Good for: cost-driven builds with heavy internal oversight

In-house team

  • Maximum control and context
  • $500K+/yr for a small senior team, plus months of hiring — before a line of code
  • Hard to right-size: too few skills early, too much payroll between pushes
  • Good for: post-product-market-fit scale

WLCM

  • A complete senior team — design, engineering, PM, QA — from day one
  • No sub-contracting, ever; you work with us, including our founder
  • Scales up or down as your needs evolve; partners for the product’s lifetime
  • Good for: funded startups and growth-stage companies that need it built right

When we’re not the right fit — a pure-cost build, a one-week task, a team you only need for staffing — we’ll say so on the first call and point you somewhere better. Selectivity works both ways.

we look forward to it

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