[shoo]

I'm not really familiar with the web agency space, but from working at a few enterprises that have outsourced dev work & technical understanding for internal line-of-business applications:

* If you're paying someone to write or customise code for you, why wouldn't you want to own that code, and be able to read and/or patch it?

* If you've outsourced the dev talent, do you have enough in house technical capability to evaluate if the company you're outsourcing to is taking you for a ride and is producing a giant pile of tech debt that will become increasingly expensive and slow to make controlled changes to (i.e. changes that don't inject a high rate of new production defects and regressions)?