Freelance developer or agency for your website?

A freelancer suits a project with a clear goal and one point of contact for business decisions — a company website, an inquiry-based portal, a booking system or a bounded internal tool. When the same person understands the requirement, writes the code and deploys the server, less time gets lost handing context between roles.

Working without an agency markup doesn't mean skipping planning, testing or training. It means your budget isn't paying for organisational overhead your scope might not need. That advantage holds when the developer you pick can genuinely finish the whole agreed job. If a project needs several specialisms or more concurrent work than one person can handle, the answer is changing the team or the timeline — not promising an impossible deadline.

I'd recommend an agency when you need to develop several connected products at once, run multiple teams, and coordinate different decision-makers. The same applies if you want branding, photography, campaigns, copywriting and development under one contract. In that kind of project, the coordination overhead and access to several specialists can justify the higher cost.

A separate reason is a genuine need for contracted on-call support and 24/7 coverage. That's a capacity of the team and its processes, not one person's good intentions. Check whether a provider actually guarantees shifts, escalation and cover for absent staff — the word 'agency' on its own isn't proof of that. Ask the proposal to state who does the work, what response time is contracted, and what happens outside normal hours.

Comparable quotes need to cover the same pages, features, content and responsibilities. A quote that includes content entry, migration, training and server deployment can't be compared on total alone with a quote for building a few screens. Also ask who supplies photos, translations, domains and access to any third-party software.

My price list starts at €450 for a business website, €900 for a booking website, and €2,500 for a custom web application. Those are starting packages, and a fixed quote arrives within 48h of a short call. The typical timelines are 1–2 weeks, 2–4 weeks and 4–10 weeks, depending on the package. Anything outside the agreed scope gets estimated separately, before that extra work begins.

Ask a provider to walk you through one real project: what they personally built, what problem it solved, and how the system runs after delivery. A nice set of screenshots isn't enough proof for handling payments, availability, or complex administration. A conversation about the real workflow, edge cases and accountability shows how well they understand production work.

My concrete example is Srbija Tours / DriveSoft, a platform that has processed 150,000+ tickets and reservations with 100+ internal users. Leto Halkidiki shows a different kind of work: a WordPress-to-Laravel rebuild and a four-language accommodation portal. Neither is a guarantee of your project's outcome — they're checkable examples of different scopes. In the case studies you can judge whether that experience is relevant to you.

With any provider, agree on access, code storage, documentation and how work is handed over. Your domain and important business accounts should stay under your own control. It matters that another qualified developer could take over maintenance later with a reasonable understanding of the project — useful even when a collaboration is going well, since people's availability changes over time.

Working with me covers a short call, a fixed quote, phased development and a launch with training. The first 30 days after launch include free fixes. Maintenance from €50/month is agreed against the price list — it's not a promise of unlimited development or permanent on-call cover. For a small or mid-sized business with a matching scope, an experienced freelancer can deliver the same quality more affordably than an agency.