Hiring an in-house team is the right answer eventually. It's almost never the right answer first. The reason is one most founders underestimate: the cost of an in-house team is dominated by the months when nothing is shipping yet.
The real cost of an in-house team
A senior engineer in Cairo costs roughly $4–7K/month all in. Two of them, plus a designer, plus the founder's time on hiring, plus laptops, software licences, recruiter fees, and the months between hire and first useful pull request — call it $200K through the first shipped milestone. That's before you've validated whether anyone wants the product.
And the team is permanent. If the product idea is wrong, you have three people with a runway clock and not enough work to fill it.
The real cost of a studio
A studio is more expensive per hour and cheaper per outcome. The reasons compound:
- No ramp-up cost. The team has shipped this kind of thing before. You pay from week one for output, not learning.
- Right-sizing. You scale the engagement up or down based on the work, not the org chart.
- No bench cost. When the project ends, the team ends.
- Shared infrastructure. CI, deploy templates, component libraries, monitoring — already built, already paid for.
The right answer at each stage
- 0 → 1 (MVP, validation). Studio. Speed and reversibility are everything.
- 1 → 10 (early traction, iteration). Studio plus first in-house product hire. The hire learns the codebase alongside the studio.
- 10 → 100 (scaling). In-house team takes over; studio rotates to specialist work.
- 100+. In-house owns the core; studio is for bursts and specialist depth.
Transitioning from one to the other
The handover from studio to in-house team is the moment most engagements go badly. Things that help: a written architecture decision log, pairing on the last few features, a 30-day overlap where the studio answers questions, and a runbook the in-house team can run in production without anyone's help.
That's how we structure handovers at Taqnihub — the engagement isn't over until your team owns it. Shape on the services page.
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