Agency, freelancer, or a small studio: who should build it?
Each of the three is the right choice for someone. The mistake is picking by price alone and discovering later what the price was buying, or not buying. Here is the trade, laid out plainly.
The comparison
| Agency | Freelancer | Small studio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Highest: pays for the team and the layers | Lowest, often padded for vague scope | Between the two, usually with a published floor |
| Who writes the code | A team you may not meet | The person you hired | The person you hired |
| Accountability | A contract and an account manager | One person, informally | One person, with a written proposal and process |
| Speed | Slower to start, parallel once running | Fast to start, limited by one person | Fast to start; scales by bringing in specialists per project |
| Continuity | Team turnover; documentation varies | Depends entirely on availability | One builder plus handover documents and source |
| Code ownership | Usually yours, check the contract | Usually yours, check that it is written | Yours, in the agreement from day one |
| Best for | Large scope, procurement, a team on site | Small, well-defined tasks | A product that needs one accountable builder |
When an agency is the right call
You have a large scope, a budget to match, a procurement process that needs a company on the other side, or you want a team physically in the room. You are paying for coordination, and at that scale coordination is the work.
When a freelancer is the right call
The task is small and clearly defined: a page, a fix, a feature in an existing codebase. There is little to coordinate and a written process would be overhead.
When a small studio is the right call
You are building a product, not a page. You want the person you talk to to be the person writing the code, and you want that person to be working from a written proposal, a fixed quote and a process you can see, rather than from goodwill. You do not want to fund an office.
That is how DevLune is set up: one builder, specialists brought in when a build needs them, a proposal and itemised quote before any money moves, and everything from the brief to the last payment in one private project link. Floors start at ₹10,000 for a website and ₹30,000 for an Android app, negotiable.
Short answers
The questions this guide gets asked most.
Crafted in the dark. Shipped to the world.
Tell us what you are building. You get a private project space with a proposal and a line-by-line quote within a day.