App build decisions, compared

Hire a freelancer for a well-defined piece of work you can check yourself. Hire an agency when you need many people at once: designers, several engineers, testers and a project manager. Choose a small senior studio when you want the engineers who quote the work to be the ones who build and maintain it. We are the third kind, two engineers in Bangalore, so we cannot staff a team of ten.

Fixed price suits work whose scope can be written down before it starts; time and materials suits work whose scope you expect to discover as you go. We quote builds at a fixed price, usually within 48 hours of a short call, with milestone payments set out in the contract. When the scope is too unclear to price honestly, we suggest a two-week Discovery Sprint first rather than padding the quote.

Start on a no-code builder when you need to put an idea in front of real users quickly and the product is mostly forms, lists and workflows. Move to custom code when the product's value sits in logic the builder cannot express, when usage charges grow with every user, or when you need to own the code. Check the exit before you start: Bubble's manual says its apps cannot be exported as code, while FlutterFlow lets paid plans download the source.

Buy, in most cases. A hosted builder such as ConferBot publishes a free plan of 600 chats a month and paid plans at $19, $39 and $59 a month per workspace, which is less than our cheapest maintenance plan for a custom build, at ₹20,000 or $350 a month. Build when the chatbot is the product you sell, or when it has to act inside your own systems in ways a builder's webhooks cannot. A disclosure: we built ConferBot for its owners, so we know both sides, and we have an interest in it doing well.

For a business app that has to run on iPhone and Android, such as a marketplace, a booking app or a delivery app, React Native gives you one codebase and one team, with native code only where a platform demands it. Go native in Swift and Kotlin when the app lives in platform features such as widgets or watch apps, or when you ship one platform with a native team. This page is not neutral: all seven phone apps we have built are React Native, and we have shipped no native-only app.

Build in-house when software is what you sell and you will change it every week for years. Outsource when you need a product built and launched before a permanent team makes sense, and plan the handover from the first day. Outsourcing to India works when the scope is written down, the code and accounts are in your name, and someone on your side accepts or rejects each milestone; without those, the saving disappears.

Stay on Upwork if you want to choose from many freelancers, pay by the hour or by the task, and vet people yourself; Upwork's own help pages say vetting and choosing freelancers is the client's responsibility. Consider us if you want one fixed price for a whole product, built and then maintained by the same senior engineers. We are a studio of two engineers, not a marketplace, so we cannot offer a choice of many freelancers.

Choose Toptal if you want to hire a screened developer by the hour, part time or full time; Toptal says about 3% of applicants pass its screening and starts engagements with a trial of up to two weeks. Choose us if you want a product delivered at a fixed price by a studio that runs its own work, from scope to maintenance.