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by davedx 682 days ago
$5M/year? In the US maybe.

A team of 5 senior freelancers in Europe will cost about 150-200k per person.

4 comments

For compensation. The carrying cost of an employee is usually twice their total compensation.
He said freelancers.

Median compensation for senior engineers in Europe is nowhere near 150k. Even in Switzerland.

Any sensible freelancer will have an hourly rate nearly double that of a fulltime employee for obvious reasons. Please stop telling him just to hire a bunch of dev freelancers. Projects like this require UX and business domain understanding. Devs are not going to be doing that. This thread is full of amateurs parading as experienced CTOs.
Freelancers.
Any sensible freelancer will have an hourly rate nearly double that of a fulltime employee for obvious reasons. Please stop telling him just to hire a bunch of dev freelancers. Projects like this require UX and business domain understanding. Devs are not going to be doing that. This thread is full of amateurs parading as experienced CTOs.
My freelancer estimate is based on 100/hour, that’s actually quite high for Europe
Employer tax contributions

Office space

Hardware and software, SaaS licensing, cloud costs, etc.

Hiring costs (recruitment, recruiters, time lost in selection and hiring)

Secondary cost to rest of the business to change processes, retrain, integrate, help the dev team understand requirements, effectively build and iterate, etc.

Quite possibly a bunch of compliance, security, audit, pen testing, and other regulatory costs depending on the demands their clients have, etc.

Running a team != hiring a bunch of freelancers as a one-off.

Do you know what a freelancer is?

You don’t make tax contributions for them. They bring their own hardware and usually software unless otherwise agreed.

The rest of the stuff is just a laundry list you made up to try and blow costs way past what they actually could be if you’re prudent. Come on

Stop giving the guy horrible advice. IF you think throwing some freelance devs with no business support/product/UX support is going to help him, you are so mistaken. Trying to rebuild an existing complex software system that handles hundreds of millions in revenue is not going to be an easy task. You are going to put the man into a corner and ruin him. Jesus.
He has his own brain, some advice based on actual experience is not going to ruin him. Please don’t be so dramatic
The point is still valid even at that price.
seems like a good ballpark number with some leeway for unexpected things