Most businesses know how to evaluate the "build vs. buy" question when it comes to choosing an eCommerce platform. It's understood that building something custom will require a lot of time, effort, and money, with many costs hidden or unforeseen. The risks are usually apparent.
However, many businesses apply far less rigor when it comes to the team responsible for developing that platform. Their instinct is to staff up to meet the challenge like any other, but the true cost of building a team is almost always higher than people think.
And the results are often worse.
The Perceived Appeal of an Internal Hire
The desire to hire internally makes sense. Having "your own" developer feels like security. You think, “This is my employee, so I have autonomy and freedom and I'm not dependent on an expensive agency.”
On paper, the economics look favorable. An internal developer or a freelancer at $40 to $50 an hour looks like a bargain compared to a specialized agency. You need work done, so you hire someone to do it. Simple.
But that instinct is almost always based on an incomplete picture of the real costs involved. Most businesses overestimate how easy it is to get productive output from a developer you need to manage yourself.
The True Total Cost of an Internal Developer
Let's start with the salary. Say you find a senior developer willing to work for $80,000 a year. For a specialized platform like Drupal Commerce, that's on the low end, and frankly, it's unlikely someone at that price is going to have the depth of experience you actually need. But let's be generous and use that number.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent Employer Costs for Employee Compensation report shows that benefits account for 30.1% of total compensation costs for private industry workers. An honest assessment, once you account for payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement contributions, and equipment, means that an $80,000 salary translates to roughly $114,000 in direct employer costs.
And that's before you factor in recruiting, onboarding, equipment, or overhead, which can push the total multiplier to 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary.
But those are just the more obvious costs.
Management overhead
How much of your time does it actually take to properly manage, direct, and keep a developer productive? That time has a real cost, and most businesses dramatically underestimate it.
Experienced engineering managers estimate that each developer requires two to three hours per week of meaningful management time. Not status updates, but real work like setting priorities, unblocking problems, reviewing output, providing business context, and keeping them pointed at the right things. Even dedicated, full-time engineering managers typically top out at six to eight direct reports before the quality of their attention degrades.
Now consider what happens when you're not a full-time engineering manager. You're a business leader who already has a full plate. Adding "manage a developer" to your responsibilities doesn't just take ten or more hours a month. It takes focus away from the things only you can do. The developer you hire suffers too, because they're not getting the direction they need to be productive.
Idle time
If you can't keep your internal developer productive and they go two weeks without clear direction, your cost per feature just doubled. You're paying their salary, benefits, and overhead regardless of output. When you work with an agency, you only pay for work delivered.
Breadth of expertise
A single developer, no matter how talented, simply cannot cover the breadth of expertise that a team offers. E-commerce implementations involve frontend development, backend architecture, payment integrations, ERP connectivity, security, performance optimization, conversion rate optimization, and more.
You don’t need a single skillset. And the "unicorn developer" who is also a product owner, a business analyst, and a project manager? They exist, but they know what they're worth, and you can't get one for $80,000.
You’re probably not good at managing developers
Most small and mid-sized businesses do not have the internal capacity to properly direct a development team. They're getting subpar results, and they don't even realize it. They don’t know what good looks like.
The Standish Group's CHAOS research has consistently shown that only about 31% of software projects are completed successfully, with 50% finishing over budget and behind schedule, and 19% canceled outright.
The leading causes of failure? Unclear requirements and poor management.
McKinsey and University of Oxford research, based on more than 5,400 IT projects, found that large IT projects run an average of 45% over budget and deliver 56% less value than predicted. In many cases, the developers did exactly what they were told to do. And that’s the problem.
Managing software development is a skill in itself, one that requires technical fluency, process discipline, and the ability to translate business needs into precise technical requirements. Most business leaders have never done it before. The learning curve is steep enough that they often don't realize how much value they're leaving on the table.
The advantage of a specialized eCommerce agency
When you engage a specialized agency, you're getting an entire team's worth of capability and experience. You're getting people who have solved your exact type of problem dozens of times before.
The perceived security of an internal hire is real as a feeling, but it's often an illusion. What actually gives you security is a team with a proven track record, deep domain expertise, and the infrastructure to deliver consistently. A single internal hire, reporting to someone who has never managed a developer before, is far more fragile than it appears.
For Drupal Commerce in particular, when you hire Centarro, you’re hiring the best Drupal Commerce developers on the planet, working together. A single internal developer can’t match that value.
So who should you hire instead?
If the argument is that you shouldn't build an internal development team, the natural question is: who should you employ? You still need someone internally.
In most cases, not more developers.
It's someone who understands your business and can serve as the bridge between your organization and your technical partners. A marketing person. A business development specialist focused on technology enablement. Someone whose mandate is to identify the business processes that need to be digitized and who can articulate those needs clearly to a development team.
Someone has to figure out what needs to be built in the first place and then oversee that process as a stakeholder. That requires deep knowledge of your business, your customers, and your market. Invest your internal hire budget in someone who can drive the business forward. Let the specialists write the code.
Reframe the equation
Do the honest math. What is the true total cost of ownership of an internal developer or team? Include the management time, the idle time, the rework, the limited expertise. Compare that to what a specialized agency delivers: a full team, deep domain knowledge, no idle cost, and none of the management overhead crowding the hours on your already full schedule.
For most businesses, the answer is clear. Partner with a specialized team that has solved your type of problem before, and put your internal investment into someone who can drive business outcomes.
That's how you get more value, faster, at a lower total cost. Don’t take on the stress of becoming a software development manager on top of everything else you're already doing.
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