ENGAGEMENT

Software Agency

A company you hire to design, build, and ship software. Software development company, dev shop, and software house all name the same kind of firm.

Last reviewed: byKevin Riedl wiki ↗

A software agency is a company you hire to design, build, and ship software: an external team that turns a problem into working, maintained code. “Software development company”, “dev shop”, and “software house” name the same kind of firm; the labels differ by marketing, not substance. Wavect is one.

What varies enormously is the engagement model underneath the label. The same word covers a body shop renting out juniors by the hour, a staff augmentation vendor plugging engineers into your team, a dedicated team owning a whole workstream, and a product partner bound to a fixed-price outcome. Decide which of those you are buying before comparing agencies, because their prices and risk profiles are not comparable.

Against the alternatives: a freelancer is cheaper but a single point of failure, in-house hiring gives full control but takes months and costs a salary whether or not there is work, and an agency trades a higher day rate for a team that has shipped before and survives one person leaving. Nearshoring discounts the day rate and adds a coordination tax. The full trade-off is mapped in freelancer vs agency vs in-house .

The questions that separate agencies matter more than the logos on their websites: who exactly writes the code (the people you met, or a bench you have not), how senior the median engineer is, who owns the intellectual property, and what happens at handover.

When this matters in a software project. The moment you decide not to build with your own employees. Picking the wrong shape of agency, not a bad agency, just the wrong model, is one of the most common ways software budgets die.

What founders usually get wrong. They compare day rates across incomparable models and pick the firm with the best salespeople, then discover the people who pitched are not the people who build.

How Wavect handles it. Wavect is a two-founder software agency: the people you talk to are the people who architect and write the code, senior by construction. See custom software development for how we deliver, and how to choose a software agency for the vetting questions we would ask in your place.

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FAQs

A company you hire to design, build, and ship software for you, from scoping through delivery and often maintenance. Unlike hiring individual freelancers, you engage a team with an existing way of working. The engagement can range from renting individual engineers to handing over an entire outcome.
The same kind of firm. Agency leans toward smaller, service-branded shops and software development company toward larger delivery organisations, but there is no technical or legal difference. Judge the engagement model, the seniority of the people, and the contract, not the label.
A freelancer is the cheapest and a single point of failure. In-house gives the most control but takes months to hire and costs a salary regardless of workload. An agency costs more per day and brings a team that has shipped before. The right answer depends on how long-lived and how critical the work is.