Most “solo vs. agency” advice comes from someone with a stake in the answer. I’m a solo developer, so I have one too.
Here’s the honest version anyway, including the projects where you should hire an agency instead of me.
Most projects land in a smaller category than either extreme, and I’ll get to that.
Where an agency is the better call
Agencies fit big builds with an aggressive deadline and parallel workstreams. If you need design, backend, frontend, content, and QA all moving at once to hit that deadline, an agency with a deep roster can put five people on it simultaneously. I can’t be five people.
They also fit when you need several specialties at full depth, all at the same time: a senior designer, a dedicated SEO lead, a brand strategist, and someone managing the project full time. I cover a lot of ground, but covering a lot of ground isn’t the same as having a specialist for every discipline sitting in the next room.
Then there’s procurement: some organizations won’t sign with a single person. They need a vendor with a team, formal SLAs, multiple points of contact, and a specific kind of paperwork. That’s a real constraint.
Where a solo developer wins
You talk to the person doing the work. When you email me about a change, you’re not waiting on a project manager to relay it to a developer you’ve never met. The person who scoped the project is the person building it, so less gets lost in translation.
You get fewer layers and less markup. Agency rates cover overhead you don’t always see directly, and often you’re paying for layers your project never touches.
Decisions happen fast. When a question comes up, there’s no internal meeting to schedule; I answer it and we move forward.
One person owns the outcome. There’s no diffusion of responsibility across a team where everyone did their part and the thing still doesn’t work.
The part most of these articles leave out
The choice isn’t as binary as it looks. A lot of projects get sent to agencies because they seem too big for one person, when what they actually need is one accountable person plus a few extra hands at the right moments.
That’s how 84EM works. I’m the one you talk to and the one accountable for the result. When a project needs more capacity or a specialty I don’t cover, I bring in trusted partners and contractors I’ve worked with for years.
Coordinating contractors still takes more lead time than staff who are already on payroll and already scheduled. If you need five extra people starting tomorrow morning, that gap matters.
You get direct access without the ceiling of “one person can only do so much.” That doesn’t erase the agency advantages above. If you need a full team running five workstreams for six months, that’s a different scope of project, and I’ll tell you so.
But for the large middle ground, plenty of projects, you can get the solo benefits without giving up the capacity.
How to actually decide
Ask what your project actually requires.
How many disciplines need to run at once? Is there a deadline that only parallel work can hit? Can you tolerate a short gap if one person is out?
If the honest answers point to an agency, hire one. That’s the right call for some projects. And if you don’t already have one in mind, I can refer you to a larger agency partner in my network that I’ve worked with and trust.
For most, you don’t need the full agency setup. You need one person accountable for the outcome, with help brought in when the project calls for it, and paying for a full agency on top of that is overhead you didn’t need.
If you’re not sure which bucket you’re in, that’s a fine thing to talk through before anyone signs anything. Send over what you’re trying to build and I’ll tell you straight whether it fits a solo developer or whether you’d be better off with a team, mine or someone else’s.
