One engineering team you retain, or three hires and months of recruiting.
Hiring gives you people who stay for years. Retaining us gives you two founders working against a staging URL from day one while you find out whether the product has earned those hires.
| Dimension | Retained team | Hiring in-house |
|---|---|---|
| Time to start | Staging URL on day one | Typically three to six months to hire and onboard |
| Who you get | Unlimited access to both founders: Naman Barkiya on engineering, Abhiraj Sakargaye on growth and positioning | Whoever accepts the offer, one discipline per hire |
| Coverage | Design, engineering, AI, and growth through one queue | A first product team is at least three hires: design, engineering, growth |
| Cost shape | One monthly fee | $130,000–$180,000 a year per mid-level US engineer in salary alone, plus equity, benefits, and recruiting fees of 15–25% of year-one salary |
| Throughput | One active request at a time, unlimited requests in the queue | As many parallel streams as you have engineers |
| Management | We scope, ship to staging, and demo every Friday. You decide what goes next | You run standups, reviews, and the roadmap, or hire someone who does |
| When priorities shift | Reorder the queue. Pause anytime | Reassign people, or carry salaries through the quiet months |
| Code ownership | Your repo, yours from the first commit | Yours, with the context living in the heads of the people you hired |
| Attention | Capped: four or fewer active engagements per co-founder | Full-time on your product and nothing else |
§01
The math on your first three hires.
A first product team is at least three hires: design, engineering, growth. A mid-level US engineer runs $130,000 to $180,000 a year in salary alone, before equity, benefits, and recruiting fees of 15 to 25 percent of year-one salary. Then three to six months to hire and onboard.
Pre-product-market-fit, that's full freight on a bet you haven't won yet. The retained version skips the search: both founders start on your queue, the staging URL goes live on day one, and requests ship in order, demoed every Friday.
§02
What one active request at a time buys you.
Hiring buys parallel capacity. We don't sell it, on purpose. One request is active; everything else waits in the queue, and you can add to that queue as often as you like.
The constraint forces the question most early teams skip: what matters most this week? Each request ships to staging and gets shown at a Friday demo before the next one starts. Nothing sits half-built across five tickets.
§03
What you keep when you do hire.
Everything. The repository lives in your organisation from the first commit, so the engineer you eventually hire reads the full history on day one instead of reverse-engineering decisions.
We've handed codebases to new in-house hires with a four-week overlap, both teams on the same code, and that overlap costs less than the rework a cold handover produces.
Retain the team until the product earns its own. Then hire against something real.
The other side
When hiring in-house wins.
When you're past product-market fit and the product is the company's only moat. Engineers who live inside one codebase for years make better calls on it than any outside team. A retainer should be the bridge to that team, not a substitute for it.
When the work needs someone in your Slack at 11pm, in every standup, and in every planning meeting. A retained team is not embedded culture. If your iteration cycle is daily and runs on several threads at once, one active request at a time will feel like a bottleneck, because for you it is.
And when the IP is the algorithm, or a regulator wants an accountable employee rather than a contract. We say this on the first call. We'd rather lose the engagement than become a dependency you resent.
Price
Tell us what would go in your queue and we'll reply with pricing within 24 hours. Ask for pricing
Questions founders ask
- Is a retained engineering team cheaper than hiring?
- It depends on the stage. Before product-market fit you skip three to six months of hiring and onboarding and the salaries that come with it; after it, in-house often wins. Send us your queue and we reply with pricing within 24 hours.
- How is a retained team different from hiring a contractor?
- A contractor fills one seat. A retained team covers design, engineering, AI, and growth through one queue, with both founders accountable for what ships.
- Can we hire our own engineers later?
- Yes, and we plan for it. The repo is yours from the first commit, and we've run four-week overlaps where the new hire and our team work the same codebase before we step back.
- What does one active request at a time mean?
- Unlimited requests wait in your queue and one is in progress. It ships to staging and gets demoed before the next one starts, so nothing sits half-finished.
- When should I hire in-house instead of retaining a team?
- When you're past product-market fit and the product is your only moat, when you need engineers embedded in daily operations, or when a regulator requires accountable employees. We'll tell you on the first call.
Keep reading
Talk to the two people who'd do the work.
A 30-minute call with Naman or Abhiraj. Or email two paragraphs on what you're building — we reply with a pricing estimate within 24 hours.
Send two or three times that work, with your timezone. A founder confirms within 24 hours.
Request a call by email