What a senior hire actually costs you
Salary is the part everyone quotes. Employer taxes, recruiting fees, equipment and the weeks before anyone ships are the part that decides the budget. Answer five questions and see both paths side by side — including when hiring in-house is the better call.
Who do you need?
Engineering
Data & AI
Product & Design
Level
How many people?
For how long do you need them?
Where would you hire?
Sets the local salary benchmark and hiring time.
Embedding is about $187,500 cheaper over 12 months.
You also start delivering roughly 13.5 weeks sooner.
On its way to
The full breakdown should land in a minute or two. Change anything above and we can send an updated one — or just reply to the email and we will sanity-check it against your actual situation.
How to read this
The totals answer one question: what it costs to get the same amount of finished work out of each path. Both sides include ramp-up time, because nobody — employee or embedded engineer — is fully productive in week one. Delay is shown in weeks rather than converted into money, since putting a price on a month of waiting says more about the calculator than about your business.
The totals are free to see. The full breakdown — where every dollar goes, how long until hiring pays off, and every benchmark we used — goes to your inbox, so you can forward it to whoever signs off on the budget. If the numbers say hire in-house, they say hire in-house.