Goa, India · Remote worldwide
Freelance developer, agency, or in-house?
If you're deciding how to get software built, you have four realistic options, and the honest answer is that the right one depends on the shape of your project rather than on which is better in the abstract.
I'm an independent developer, so I have an obvious interest here. I've tried to write this so it's still useful if you conclude I'm the wrong choice — including a section on exactly when that's true.
The short version
Agencies are worth it when scope is large enough to need multiple people and you value process over direct access. Marketplace freelancers are worth it when the task is small, well-defined, and low-risk if it has to be redone. In-house hiring is worth it when you need an ongoing engineering function rather than a finished product. An independent developer is worth it when you have one focused system to build, it has to work in production, and you want to talk directly to whoever is writing it.
Where the money actually goes
Agency pricing carries account management, sales, project management and bench time. That overhead buys real things — continuity if someone leaves, someone to escalate to — but on a single-system project it's often most of the invoice.
Marketplace pricing looks cheaper and sometimes is. The risk is that competitive bidding rewards whoever promises the most for the least, and the cost of a rewrite lands on you rather than on them.
When you should not hire me
If you need a team of five working in parallel to hit a fixed launch date, one person is the wrong shape and an agency is the right call. If you need 24/7 production support with an on-call rotation, I can't provide that alone. If the work is ongoing product engineering with no defined end, hiring in-house will cost less over a year. And if your project is purely design-led with no real engineering underneath, a design studio will serve you better.
Where an independent developer genuinely wins
Projects that cross hardware and software, because agencies subcontract one half and the seam becomes your problem. Projects where the person you briefed being the person who builds it actually matters. And projects where the budget is real but not agency-scale, and you'd rather spend it on engineering than on account management.
The options side by side
A development agency
- Strength:
- Bench depth, account management, and the ability to absorb a large scope.
- Trade-off:
- You pay for the overhead, the developer writing your code is rarely the person you spoke to, and hardware work usually gets subcontracted anyway.
- Pick me when:
- Your project is one focused system rather than a multi-team programme, and you want to talk directly to whoever is building it.
A marketplace freelancer
- Strength:
- Cheap, fast to hire, and easy to replace.
- Trade-off:
- Bidding pressure rewards whoever promises most for least. Hardware and full-stack skills are rarely in the same person, so integration falls back on you.
- Pick me when:
- The project has to actually work in production, and a rewrite three months in would cost more than doing it properly now.
Hiring in-house
- Strength:
- Full-time attention and long-term ownership of the system.
- Trade-off:
- Months of hiring, salary and equipment overhead, and a hard problem to solve if you only need one system built once.
- Pick me when:
- You need a specific product built and handed over, not a permanent engineering function.
What you actually get
One person covers firmware, backend, frontend, and deployment
On a connected-hardware project, most clients end up hiring a firmware contractor and a separate web agency, then absorbing the integration risk themselves. Smart Well Management and Smart Waste Management were each built end to end by one person — sensor selection, ESP32 firmware, database, dashboard, deployment.
Eleven shipped projects with live demos and public source code
Most portfolios show mockups. Nine of eleven projects here have either a working deployment you can open right now or a public GitHub repository, or both.
Five hackathon podium finishes, including Smart India Hackathon
Independently judged evidence of building working systems under deadline, rather than self-reported claims about speed.
India-based rates, timezone that overlaps Europe and the Gulf
IST (UTC+5:30) gives a full morning overlap with Europe and the Middle East, and an evening overlap with US Eastern. Costs are well below US or EU agency rates without routing through an intermediary.
You own the code from day one
Work lives in your repository, deploys to your infrastructure, and ships with setup documentation. No proprietary platform to keep renting.
Relevant services
Questions
Is a freelance developer cheaper than an agency?
Usually yes, because you're not paying for account management, sales overhead or bench time. But cheaper isn't automatically better value — an agency gives you continuity if one person becomes unavailable, and that's worth paying for on long or business-critical programmes.
What's the risk of hiring one person instead of a team?
Bus factor, honestly. One person can get ill or become unavailable. I mitigate it by keeping code in your repository from day one, writing setup documentation, and using standard mainstream tools rather than anything exotic, so another developer can pick it up. On a long programme with a hard deadline, that risk may still be too high for you — that's a fair reason to choose an agency.
How do I judge whether a developer can actually deliver?
Ask for systems you can open and use, not screenshots. Ask what went wrong on a recent project and how they handled it. Ask who owns the code and where it lives. Vague answers to any of those are the signal.
Tell me what you're trying to build
A couple of sentences is enough. I read every message myself and reply within about a day — including a straight no if it isn't a fit.
Get in touch