Engineering subscription vs hiring an agency: where the math breaks

Agencies are good at fixed-scope projects with a defined deliverable and a defined end. Build a website by Q3. Ship an MVP in eight weeks. Migrate a system. Those are agency-shaped problems. Most product engagements are not those problems.

Product roadmaps shift. Customer feedback rewrites the next feature. Compliance requirements change. A founder pivots in week six. An agency contract priced and scoped in week zero doesn't have a graceful way to handle any of that.

The agency cost stack

A typical mid-market agency engagement opens with a four to eight week discovery phase priced at €10,000 to €20,000 (you pay for the spec). Then a six to twelve month build contract at €12,000 to €18,000 per month, anchored to quarterly milestones. The agency typically staffs a senior account manager (your point of contact) who is not the person writing code, plus a team of more junior implementers.

Six months of mid-market agency work, end to end, is €90,000 to €130,000. The engineering capacity per dollar is roughly comparable to in-house hires, with the trade-off that the agency carries the management overhead so you don't.

Why the model fits some problems and not others

If your work is a discrete project, the agency model is fine. You define the scope, sign a contract, and a team executes it. If your work is continuous, the agency model imposes friction at every roadmap turn: change requests, scope debates, contract amendments, a senior account manager who has to translate between you and the people doing the work.

Subscription removes the contract layer. The shared backlog is the contract. What's on it this week is what we build this week. If priorities change Monday, the work changes Tuesday. There is no quarterly milestone to renegotiate.

Where Stacklane sits

Stacklane runs on the subscription model because the buyers we work with run continuous product roadmaps. The agency model and the subscription model are not in direct competition for the same buyer; they are different products for different problem shapes. We are explicit about that in our discovery calls. If your work is project-shaped, we will say so.