Structured by AI vs hiring a developer
A full-time engineer on your payroll — the highest-commitment option, and the one that gives you the most control.
Total control, deep context on your business over time, and someone whose whole week belongs to you. For a business with enough continuous engineering work to fill a full-time role, this is genuinely the right answer.
You cannot hire a fraction of a good engineer. Below that threshold you are paying full-time for part-time need, and a single junior with no system around them tends to produce a pile of half-finished internal tools.
Typical US salary $120–160k, roughly $9,000+/month once employer costs are included — before recruiting time and before you have managed anyone. Market range, not a figure from our clients.
To be fair: If you genuinely have forty hours a week of engineering work and the budget for it, hire someone. A full-time engineer who knows your business deeply will out-deliver any outside arrangement, and we would tell you that on the call.
See the platform you'd be starting from
This is the difference the comparison above keeps coming back to: with hiring a developer, week one starts from nothing. Here it starts from software that is already running.