What a developer really costs once you count taxes, tools, management, and the months spent recruiting.
Every few months an owner tells me they are thinking about hiring a developer, and every few months I walk them through the same arithmetic. Not to talk them out of it. Sometimes hiring is right. But the number on a job advert is not the cost of an engineer, and once the real one is on the table the comparison usually surprises people.
What an in-house engineer actually costs
A developer on a €90,000 salary in Germany costs €110,000 to €115,000 fully loaded, which is roughly €9,200 to €9,600 a month. What sits on top of the salary is employer taxes and social contributions, pension, equipment, software licences, recruitment fees spread over tenure, and the slice of management time it takes to direct someone’s work.
And it buys one discipline. A backend engineer is rarely also your DNS and server-hardening person, your data-pipeline person and your workflow-automation person. The gaps between those specialities are precisely where business systems fail, and one hire does not close them.
That is one side of the comparison. The other side is what you already spend, which almost nobody has added up. The cost calculator totals it, including the staff hours and the downtime that never reach an invoice.
The utilisation problem nobody prices in
Here is the quieter cost. Most established businesses outside the software industry do not have forty hours a week of genuine engineering work. They have bursts: a build, a migration, a bad week, a quarter of improvements. In between, a full-time engineer is idle, inventing work, or drifting into projects that did not need to exist. You pay for all of someone’s time and use a part of it, which puts your effective hourly cost well above what the salary suggests.
The arithmetic on the other side
Ongoing care here runs at four levels. Upkeep is €95 a month for the routine on a system built or rebuilt here. Maintain is €1,200 for monitoring, maintenance and incident response, Partner is €2,500, and Embedded is €5,000. Every level above Upkeep covers the four disciplines together, infrastructure, web, data and automation, and every one of them is a cap on the monthly bill rather than a quantity of hours. There is no allowance to run down and nothing to lose at the end of the month.
Builds work the same way: fixed prices from €3,500, agreed in writing before work starts, with an operating period included so nothing is delivered and then abandoned. The numbers are public on the pricing page, because a cost comparison you cannot check is not a comparison.
When hiring genuinely wins
Honesty matters here. If you have forty hours of engineering work every single week, hire. If engineering is your product, hire, and more than once. If you need somebody physically in your office daily, hire. Fractional is not a cheap substitute for a team. It is the right shape for a business whose systems matter commercially but whose engineering workload is real, recurring and part-time.
The comparison in one paragraph
An in-house hire at that level costs €9,200 to €9,600 a month for one discipline, and a utilisation rate you will never measure. A retainer here costs €1,200 to €5,000 a month and covers four disciplines, with a €95 routine plan underneath it for systems whose operational surface is genuinely small. The idle time is priced out because it is shared across a small number of businesses rather than billed to one. What you give up is exclusivity, and unless you can fill a full-time week, exclusivity is the most expensive thing on the list.
If you want the model itself explained first, start with what fractional engineering is. If you want the arithmetic applied to your own systems, that is the audit: €450, fixed before it starts and credited in full against a build or a retainer if one follows. The document is yours either way. It opens with a free conversation of about twenty-five minutes, which works out whether this is a problem worth looking at properly and which route you are on. That conversation will not tell you what is wrong with your systems. The audit will, in writing, and the contact page sets out what it covers.