HireCade helps startups, scale-ups, and enterprises build complete software projects, from customer-facing products to internal tools and platforms. We assemble the team and develop your project end to end.
Not every project is a startup product, and not every company needs to move at the same pace. Some teams are building something new, others are modernizing legacy systems, and many are creating internal tools to improve operations and visibility. What they usually have in common is that the plan is clear and the people to execute it are not there yet.
Hiring a permanent team for a project with a defined end is slow and hard to unwind. Hiring individual freelancers leaves you doing the integration work yourself: scoping, sequencing, code review, and the awkward gaps where nobody owns the deployment pipeline. Both routes push project management back onto whoever on your side already has a full-time job.
We work across all of those scenarios. We help founders launch ideas, product teams scale platforms, and larger organizations build reliable internal systems that support real business workflows. Our role is simple: bring the right people together, apply proven engineering practices, and deliver software that works.
We take full ownership of your software project, from planning to deployment and ongoing support. One team carries the work from the first architecture decision to the production release, so there is no handover gap where context gets lost.
We help founders validate ideas, launch MVPs quickly, and build strong foundations for growth. That means shipping the narrowest version that can be tested with real users, without the shortcuts that make version two a rewrite.
Custom internal tools that improve efficiency, visibility, and operational workflows. Dashboards, admin panels, approval flows, and reporting built around how your team actually works rather than around a generic template.
Robust platforms built with modern frameworks, cloud-native infrastructure, and scalable architecture. We size the architecture to the load you can justify, not to a hypothetical scale you may never reach.
Practical AI integrations that enhance workflows, automate tasks, and improve decision-making. We start from the task you want removed from someone's day, then decide whether a model, a rules engine, or a better form is the honest answer.
APIs, third-party services, infrastructure scaling, and performance optimization. This is often where existing products lose the most time, because the slow part is rarely the code you wrote most recently.
Every project requires different skills. A startup MVP, an internal tool, and a large platform demand different balances of experience, speed, and attention to detail, and the team that is right for one is usually wrong for another. A three-person MVP crew put on a regulated enterprise integration will move fast in the wrong direction.
So we compose the team per engagement: engineers, designers, and technical leads aligned with your goals, timeline, and complexity. The technical lead is the part most teams underestimate. Someone has to hold the architecture in their head, decide what is worth building properly and what is worth building twice, and say no to scope that will not survive contact with production.
You get senior, product-minded engineers who ask why a feature exists before they estimate it, and clear communication and accountability throughout. The team is ours to manage and staff, which means holidays, illness, and a specialist you need for three weeks are our problem to solve rather than a gap in your plan.
What you get with HireCade
Web and mobile apps used by customers, partners, or external users.
Dashboards, workflows, admin panels, and reporting systems for internal teams.
Large-scale platforms, integrations, and business-critical systems.
Replacing or re-platforming systems that still work but cost too much to change.
An MVP that validates the idea and leaves foundations worth keeping.
A parallel workstream so your in-house engineers stay on the core roadmap.
These three routes solve different problems, and the cost difference between them is usually smaller than the difference in how long they take to start and how easily they stop.
| Consideration | HireCade build team | Hire in-house | Traditional dev agency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | A defined project with a start and an end, or capacity alongside your own team | Long-term product ownership where the software is the business | One-off delivery where you want a fixed scope quoted up front |
| Time to start | Weeks, because we compose the team from people we already work with | Two to six months per senior hire, longer if the market is tight | Weeks to months, depending on the agency's current bench and sales cycle |
| Cost shape | Quoted per engagement, based on team composition and duration | Salaries, employer costs, equipment, and recruiting fees, fixed and ongoing | Fixed-price statement of work, with change requests priced separately |
| Who owns the code and IP | You do, assigned to you in the engagement contract | You do, by default as the employer | Varies by contract, and some agencies retain reusable components or frameworks |
| Team continuity | We hold the team together for the engagement and staff cover for absence | Highest continuity while people stay, and a real gap when someone leaves | Lowest, since consultants are often rotated between clients mid-project |
| Flexibility to scale down | Reduce or end at the agreed notice, with no redundancy process | Hard, and in many countries a formal and expensive process | Contract runs to the end of the statement of work whether you need it or not |
| Who does the product thinking | Shared, with a technical lead who pushes back on scope | Your team, which is the strongest option when the domain is complex | Usually you, since the agency is measured on delivering the written scope |
| Where it is weakest | Deep domain knowledge takes time to transfer, so long-horizon core products still favour in-house | Slow to start, hard to unwind, and expensive if the project ends before the hires pay off | Fixed scope resists learning, so anything you discover mid-build becomes a change request |
If the software is your core product and the roadmap runs for years, hire in-house and use an embedded team to move faster in the meantime. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the handover is easier when it is planned from the start.
Build engagements are quoted per project rather than sold from a rate card, because the price is driven by team composition and duration. The main inputs are how many engineers you need, whether the work needs design and a technical lead, the seniority the domain demands, and how long the team is committed for. We give you the full monthly cost before you commit.
Build team
A team composed for your project, priced on composition and duration.
Contract placements
For adding individual contractors to a team you already run, rather than taking a full build team.
Full-service recruiting
When the honest answer is that you should hire permanently. A 10% retainer plus a 20% placement fee against first-year base salary.
Our applicant tracking system is free forever with unlimited jobs, candidates, and team seats. AI resume ranking is $0.10 per resume and AI interview screening is $5 per interview if you want to run the hiring yourself.
We go through the outcome you need, the constraints you are working inside, and the deadline that actually matters.
Engineers, designers, and a technical lead matched to the complexity, with the composition and cost agreed before we start.
Work ships in reviewable slices with a visible plan, so you can change direction on evidence rather than at the end.
Deployment, documentation, and knowledge transfer to your team, with ongoing support if you want us to stay.
The decision is less about cost per developer than about how long the work lasts and how much it will change. An in-house team is the right answer when the software is the business, the domain knowledge is deep and slow to transfer, and the roadmap runs for years. You pay for that with a long hiring runway and a fixed cost base that is hard to reduce if priorities shift.
A traditional agency is a good fit when the scope is genuinely knowable in advance: a marketing site, a well-understood integration, a migration with a clear before and after. The fixed-price model works because there is little to discover. It works badly for products, because everything you learn from users after the statement of work is signed arrives as a change request rather than as a course correction.
An embedded team sits between the two. You get people who work inside your process, attend your standups, and adjust as the plan changes, without the hiring runway or the redundancy risk. The trade-off is real: domain knowledge takes time to build and some of it leaves when the engagement ends, so the sensible pattern is to keep the product decisions and the core architecture ownership on your side and use the embedded team for delivery capacity.
There are cases where you should not outsource the build at all. If the software is your primary competitive advantage, if the domain takes months to understand well enough to make good trade-offs, if you have no one internally who can make product decisions and review technical direction, or if security or regulatory constraints mean the code cannot leave your walls, hire in-house and accept the slower start. An embedded team amplifies a clear direction; it cannot supply one. We would rather say that up front than take an engagement that will disappoint both of us.
Build engagements are quoted per project rather than priced from a rate card, because the cost is driven by team composition and duration. The inputs are the number of engineers, whether you need design and a technical lead, the seniority the domain requires, and how long the team is committed for.
We give you the full monthly cost and the expected duration before you commit, and we tell you if a smaller team over a longer period is the better value. If your real need is one contractor rather than a team, contract placements are 30% of engagement fees, and if you should be hiring permanently, full-service recruiting is a 10% retainer plus a 20% placement fee against first-year base salary.
You do. Ownership of the source code, the designs, and the intellectual property created during the engagement is assigned to you in the contract, and it is yours whether or not you continue working with us afterwards.
This is worth checking with any partner you consider, because some agencies retain ownership of reusable frameworks or components embedded in your product. We hand over the repositories, the infrastructure configuration, and the documentation, so another team can pick the work up without needing us.
It depends on scope, and any answer given before we have looked at your project would be a guess. What we can commit to is telling you the duration we believe the work needs after scoping, and being clear about which parts of the estimate are confident and which depend on unknowns such as third-party APIs or data quality in an existing system.
We work in reviewable increments rather than disappearing for months, so you see progress early and can change direction on evidence. If the estimate turns out to be wrong, you find out in the first few weeks rather than at the deadline.
Yes, and this is one of the more common arrangements. The build team takes a parallel workstream, which lets your in-house engineers stay on the core roadmap instead of splitting their attention across two priorities.
It works best when there is a named person on your side who owns product decisions and reviews technical direction. Without that, two teams end up making incompatible architecture choices and merging them costs more than the parallelism saved.
Customer-facing web and mobile applications, internal tools such as dashboards and admin panels, larger platforms and business-critical systems, integrations, and legacy modernization where a system still works but has become too expensive to change.
We also build practical AI and automation features, though we start from the task you want removed from someone's day rather than from the technology. Sometimes the honest recommendation is a better workflow rather than a model.
We deploy, document, and hand over to your team, including the repositories, infrastructure configuration, and the reasoning behind the significant architecture decisions. The goal is that your engineers can change the system without calling us.
If you want us to stay for ongoing support or a second phase, we can, and you can scale the team down at the agreed notice rather than running a redundancy process. Many engagements taper rather than stopping outright.
When the software is your core competitive advantage and the roadmap runs for years, when the domain takes months to understand well enough to make good trade-offs, or when security or regulatory constraints mean the code cannot leave your organization. In those cases the slow hiring runway is worth paying.
The two options are not exclusive. A common pattern is to use a build team to move now while you recruit, then plan the handover into the engagement from the start. If we think that is your situation, we will say so, and we can run the permanent search for you as well.
Book a demo and we will go through the outcome you need, the constraints you are working inside, and the deadline that matters. You can also email build@hirecade.com with a description of the project.
After that conversation we come back with a proposed team composition, a duration, and a full monthly cost. If we do not think we are the right fit, we will tell you rather than quoting anyway.
Whether you are building a new product, an internal system, or a complete software platform, tell us the outcome and the deadline. We will come back with a team composition, a duration, and a cost.
