Hiring someone to build a website can get complicated surprisingly quickly.

Maybe your current site is showing its age. Maybe your business has grown beyond the site you started with. Maybe you need something completely new. Whatever brought you here, eventually you have to answer a deceptively simple question:

Who should build it?

For many businesses, the obvious answer is an agency.

And sometimes that is absolutely the right answer.

Agencies can bring designers, developers, project managers, writers, SEO specialists, marketers, and other expertise together under one roof. If your project genuinely requires all of those disciplines and expertise working simultaneously, having an established team can be incredibly valuable.

But not every project does.

Sometimes what you actually need is a good developer, a designer, or perhaps a couple of specialists working together. Before hiring an entire organization, it is worth figuring out what problem you’re actually trying to solve. Moreover, you can get more bang for your buck to find an experienced developer who can design as well.

Start with the problem, Not the solution.

One of the easiest mistakes to make in software is deciding on the solution before fully understanding the problem.

Web projects aren’t much different and “I need a new website” isn’t really a problem statement. First off, why do you need one?

Maybe customers can’t find important information. Maybe updating your existing site is painful. Maybe it performs poorly on mobile devices. Maybe your branding has changed. Maybe your employees are spending hours manually doing something that the website could automate.

Those are problems.

Once you understand them, you can start figuring out what expertise is actually necessary to solve them. Sometimes, you may discover that your project is considerably more complicated than you initially realized—and an agency really is the best choice.

That discovery should happen before you decide who to hire.

What are you really paying for?

When you hire an agency, you aren’t simply paying someone to design and build your website.

You’re paying for an organization and that organization may include account management, project management, sales, administration, designers, developers, copywriters, marketing specialists, office expenses, and all of the other costs involved in operating a business with employees.

That isn’t inherently a bad thing. Those resources are precisely why agencies can take on large and complicated projects that need multiple hands working together to meet a deadline.

The question is whether your project needs them. Because if you’re launching a major ecommerce platform, developing a new brand, producing original photography, planning a marketing campaign, writing hundreds of pages of content, and building custom software at the same time, coordinating all of those disciplines yourself could become a job of its own. Then an agency starts making a lot of sense.

But if you need someone to rebuild a ten-page company website, the calculation may look very different.

The truth is, finding an agency that can accurately quantify the cost of a project can be challenging in itself. There are a lot of factors to consider, including how the agency works and how many people are interpreting your requirements before they finally reach a developer.

A story can change the more times it’s told, and important details can get lost along the way. Sometimes that leads to a better solution—a happy little accident from a team that knows how to build great interfaces. Other times, an agency can coalesce around a solution to a problem that isn’t quite the problem you intended to solve.

That’s where the structure of the team matters. An agency that reduces the distance between the person describing the problem and the person actually building the solution can save time, reduce misunderstandings, and make the final cost easier to predict. Sometimes, fewer layers of translation are simply a better way to work.

Another thing to consider is who will actually be doing the work. An agency may come with an entire team, but you don’t always get the opportunity to vet every person assigned to your project. The experience level of that team can vary, and the people you meet during the sales process aren’t necessarily the people making the day-to-day decisions.

That matters because adding more people doesn’t automatically lead to better results. An inexperienced designer or developer can send a team down a series of unnecessary rabbit holes before arriving at a solution that could have been much simpler. A larger team can bring valuable expertise, but it can also introduce more opinions, more handoffs, and more opportunities to overcomplicate the problem.

Agencies are often more expensive because you’re effectively paying for more people and more hours to keep a project moving toward its requirements and deadline. That added capacity can be exactly what a project needs, especially when the scope is too large or the timeline too aggressive for one person to handle responsibly.

And that’s when I would recommend an agency. If the project genuinely requires several disciplines working in parallel to hit a deadline, the additional cost isn’t unnecessary overhead—it’s the cost of having the capacity to get the job done.

When an agency makes sense.

There are projects where I would happily recommend working with an agency.

Large projects often involve several disciplines that need to move forward at the same time. Branding might influence design. Design influences development. Content influences both. Marketing requirements can affect analytics, SEO, landing pages, and technical architecture.

Someone has to coordinate all of that and when it comes to a set deadline a good agency already has processes to orchestrate a team to do all of it more quickly.

They can also provide redundancy. If one developer goes on vacation or a designer becomes unavailable, the entire project doesn’t necessarily stop. For businesses with aggressive schedules or ongoing needs across multiple disciplines, that can be extremely important.

There is value in having a team.

You just need to make sure you’re actually buying something you need because you ultimately pay for it.

When hiring a freelancer might be better.

A lot of web projects aren’t enormous.

A small business may need a professional marketing site, a handful of custom WordPress components, a contact form, analytics, and someone who can make updates when necessary.

That doesn’t necessarily require six people.

Working directly with an experienced developer or designer can also remove some of the layers between the person asking for something and the person actually building it.

In other words, you explain the problem to the developer. The developer asks questions. You discuss the options. Then the developer builds it. There isn’t necessarily an account manager translating your request for a project manager who then creates a ticket for a developer who wasn’t part of the original conversation.

On a small project, these steps can sometimes just be extra layers that ends up being more time that you are paying for.

A freelancer doesn’t carry the same overhead as an agency, which can often translate into a lower hourly rate. But the savings can go beyond the rate itself. A good freelancer may also need fewer total hours to solve the same problem because there are fewer meetings, handoffs, and layers of coordination along the way.

The trade-off is often time. One person can only do so many things at once, so a freelancer may take longer to deliver a project simply because the work has to happen more sequentially. That doesn’t necessarily mean more billable hours—it may just mean those hours are spread across a longer timeline.

With that in mind, an experienced freelancer can absolutely take on larger projects at a lower overall cost when the project has enough flexibility. If the deadline doesn’t require several disciplines working in parallel, hiring a larger team may provide capacity you simply don’t need.

There is also a middle ground.

The choice doesn’t have to be between one freelancer sitting alone at a laptop and a fifty-person agency.

Experienced independent professionals tend to know other experienced independent professionals. A developer might bring in a designer when a project needs one. A designer might recommend a copywriter. A photographer might come in for one particular part of the project.

That allows a small team to form around the actual requirements of the project rather than starting with a permanent team and finding work for everyone. Because those specialists can often work more independently and asynchronously, there may also be less coordination overhead between them.

For some projects, that’s a useful middle ground: bring in the expertise when it’s needed, without paying for an entire team when it isn’t.

So, do you really need an agency?

Maybe.

That’s not a particularly dramatic conclusion, but I think it’s the useful one.

If your project requires multiple disciplines, significant coordination, ongoing marketing, large amounts of content, aggressive timelines, or the capacity of an established team, an agency may be worth every penny.

But if your needs are focused, you may be better served by working directly with an experienced professional—or a small group of specialists assembled around the project.

The important thing is not to start by asking:

“Which agency should I hire?”

Start with:

“What am I actually trying to accomplish?”

Figure out the problem. Figure out what expertise you need. Then decide what kind of team makes sense.

Sometimes that answer will be an agency.

Sometimes it won’t.

And knowing the difference can save you a lot more than money.