Somewhere between the second missed deadline and the fourth Canva file that does not match the brand, most companies ask the same question. Do we hire someone, or do we send this out?
The answer depends on one number you can work out in about ten minutes, and on a second question almost nobody asks until it is too late.
How much design work do you actually have?
Count the design requests your company made in the last three months. Not the ones you wished you had made. The ones that actually got asked for: social graphics, a deck, a landing page, an ad set, a one-pager, a site change.
Divide by three. That monthly number decides almost everything.
- Under about 8 a month. A good freelancer is the right answer. You will not keep a subscription busy enough to justify it, and you certainly will not keep a hire busy.
- Roughly 8 to 30 a month. This is where outsourcing to a subscription or a studio wins. Steady enough to need someone who knows your brand, not steady enough to fill a salary.
- Consistently above 30, with a roadmap behind it. Hire. At that volume you want someone in the room, in your standups, who can say no to bad requests.
Most companies who think they need a hire land in the middle band. The feeling of needing a designer usually arrives well before the workload does.
What a designer actually costs
A senior graphic designer runs about $6,250 a month fully loaded. A senior web or UX designer is closer to $8,200. Those are the benchmarks we use, and they are before the parts nobody puts in the business case.
Recruiting takes weeks of someone's time. Ramp takes another month or two before the work looks like your brand. Software sits on top. And the cost does not move when the work does: a quiet December costs exactly what a frantic September costs.
The harder problem is coverage. One designer is one skill set. The person who makes beautiful brand work is often not the person who builds the landing page, and neither of them is the developer who puts it live. Companies solve this by hiring a generalist and then quietly outsourcing everything the generalist cannot do.
What outsourcing actually costs
The market splits three ways.
- Freelancers, $40 to $150 an hour. Cheapest per unit, and fine at low volume. The cost is your time: briefing, chasing, and stitching together work from people who do not talk to each other.
- Agencies, per project. Strong for a defined build with a deadline. Poor for a steady queue, because every small request needs a scope, an estimate and an approval before anyone starts.
- Subscriptions, $699 to $5,000 a month. Flat monthly rate, unlimited requests, usually one or two worked at a time. Good for steady volume, wrong for one big project with a hard launch date.
We wrote a full breakdown of that third category, with current prices from each vendor, in our comparison of design subscription services.
The question nobody asks: who does the building?
This is the one that catches people out, and it applies to hiring and outsourcing both.
Most design work is not finished when the design is finished. A landing page design is a file. It becomes a landing page when someone builds it. If your designer hands off to a developer who is busy shipping product, you have not removed the bottleneck, you have moved it one step later and made it harder to see.
So before you compare any two options, ask what happens after the Figma file. Three of the six best-known design subscriptions do not include development at all. Plenty of in-house design hires arrive expecting a front-end developer to already be there.
When hiring is clearly right
- Design is the product. If you are building software, product design belongs in the building, in the standups, arguing with engineers.
- You need someone to say no. Outsourced teams execute requests. They will not tell your sales director that the thing they asked for is a bad idea.
- The volume is genuinely there and it is not going away.
When outsourcing is clearly right
- The workload is real but uneven. You need capacity in launch months and nothing in February.
- You need more than one skill. Brand, web, deck, motion and front end from one hire is not a realistic ask.
- You want it to stop being a management job. The point of outsourcing is that someone else owns the queue.
- You want to start this week rather than in two months.
The honest middle path
A lot of companies land on one in-house person who owns brand and judgement, plus an outsourced team for production volume. The hire keeps the standard and says no. The outsourced team absorbs the peaks without you carrying that cost in the quiet months.
That arrangement costs less than two hires and covers more ground than either option alone. It is what most of our clients are actually doing, and it is worth considering before you write a job description.
How to decide this week
- Count last quarter's requests and divide by three.
- Write down which of them needed building, not just designing.
- List the distinct skills involved. If it is more than two, one hire will not cover it.
- Ask whether you need someone to decide what gets made, or only to make it. If it is the former, you are looking for a marketing lead, not a designer.
We run a design and development subscription at $3,699 a month, with a designer and a developer on the same queue, and we publish the rate and the salary maths behind it. If your monthly count came out under eight, hire a freelancer instead. We would rather tell you that now.
