When Time Is Money: The Hourly Model of Hiring A Dedicated Resource

All businesses these days require a website. Depending on your product or service, you may also need an app. For both of these, it’s essential that you hire dedicated development resources to create a great looking and smooth working customer-facing interface for your brand. However, you may not need to hire a dedicated web developer as a full-time employee. Instead, you can opt to outsource the development to an off-shore agency or even a local agency and pay them at an hourly or fixed rate. 

You may be familiar with the project rate or fixed rate, which is a fixed sum paid for a development project. But what does an hourly rate entail? And what are its advantages? Let’s take a deeper look at the hourly model of hiring a dedicated resource: 

Hourly Model of Hiring a Dedicated Resource: 

As the name suggests, an hourly model means you will hire dedicated web developers or dedicated mobile app developers by the hour. Every hour that the team or individual developer works on your app or website will be accounted for and you will be billed a fixed sum for each hour. An hourly model is preferable when you’re not entirely sure of the scope of a project or if your requirements are flexible.

Advantages of an hourly model:

An hourly model of payment or billing is very popular for a variety of reasons:

#1: Reduced costs

Hiring a full-time developer as an employee can get expensive. Depending on the scope of the work, you may also have to hire an entire team, which means even more costs. On the other hand, when you hire dedicated mobile app developers or hire dedicated web developers, you will have the advantage of experts working on your app or website but will not have to pay any of the additional expenses you would incur for a full-time employee such as paid leave, healthcare, and other amenities. The hourly model also covers the cost of every resource that works on your project thus maximizing savings. 

#2: Efficiency

Since time is the deciding factor for payment, clear goals will be outlined and aim to be achieved in the estimated number of hours. This ensures that all development efforts are conducted in the most efficient way. As every task will be listed and detailed, you can keep a track of the progress made. Paying by the hour also helps to streamline the review, approval and iteration process as the project can be broken down into sub-tasks depending on the time they will take. It’s the best way to stay on top of things when you hire dedicated mobile app developers for agencies. 

#3: Accountability 

Since every minute is accounted for, there is no room for ambiguity about the work done. You will always be able to plot how much progress was made in every hour, or a period of hours, as may be the case. When you hire dedicated mobile developers and pay them by an hourly model, you can rest assured that not a single minute of the time spent on your project will be unproductive.  Moreover, every part of the project will be delivered to you on a regular basis, so you will never be left wondering as to the status of the work. 

#4: Flexibility 

An hourly model provides you, as a client, an immense amount of flexibility. It allows you to prioritize tasks based on their urgency or importance and have those done first. You can also add tasks as required and continue the engagement for as long or short a duration as you may need. And if you find that certain tasks will take more time than anticipated and are stretching your budget, you can always rethink and amend the task, with advice from your dedicated web developer or your dedicated mobile app developers. 

All of these advantages make using an hourly model of hiring a dedicated resource a great option for brands and businesses looking to get their mobile app or website developed. No wonder it is considered to be a  best practice for payment when you hire dedicated mobile app developers.

However, its success largely depends on the quality of the resources you hire. When you hire dedicated web app developers for agencies that are professional and reputed like Webvillee, you get the most bang for your buck. Hiring inexperienced or unprofessional development resources may end up costing you more when you pay by the hour. They may take longer to do each task, may require multiple iterations to get things up to scratch or may not have any efficient processes in place, leading to a lot of wasted time and money. 
If you already use the hourly model for payment, are there any other advantages you experience when you hire dedicated mobile developers?  Or do you prefer to pay dedicated resources at a fixed rate? Let us know in the comments below!