I've been the freelancer competing against agency proposals more times than I can count. Here's the honest breakdown, including where I'd tell you to hire the agency.
I have an obvious bias here — I'm a freelancer, and if you hire me, I get paid. So instead of pretending to be neutral, let me just be direct about where each option actually wins, including the parts where hiring an agency is the smarter move even though it means I don't get the work.
The Pitch You'll Hear From Both Sides
Agencies will tell you they de-risk your project with process, project management, and a bench of specialists. Freelancers will tell you you're getting direct access to the person actually writing the code, at a fraction of the overhead. Both pitches are true. Neither one tells you which is right for your MVP.
What You Actually Get From a Freelancer
Direct communication. You're talking to the person building your product, not a project manager relaying your feedback to a developer you'll never speak with.
Lower cost, generally. No agency overhead, no bench of people billing hours on your project who aren't touching your codebase.
Faster decisions. One person making architecture calls moves faster than a team routing decisions through a process.
Consistency. The person who designed the data model in week one is still the person writing code in week eight — nothing gets lost in a handoff.
The trade-off: you're depending on one person's bandwidth, and one person genuinely can't move as many features in parallel as a team of five.
What You Actually Get From an Agency
Parallel capacity. Multiple people working simultaneously means faster throughput on large scopes.
Built-in redundancy. If one developer is unavailable, the project doesn't stop — someone else on the team can pick it up.
Specialist coverage. Dedicated designers, QA, and DevOps people instead of one generalist wearing every hat.
Process and accountability structures that some teams — especially non-technical founders — genuinely need to feel confident the project is on track.
The trade-off: higher cost, more communication layers, and less direct access to the people actually writing your code.
Where I'd Tell You to Hire the Agency Instead
Genuinely — hire an agency if: you need a large team working in parallel to hit an aggressive deadline across many features at once; you have zero technical background and need heavy process and hand-holding to feel confident; or your project needs specialist skills (say, hardware integration and backend and design, all deeply) that one generalist realistically can't cover well.
How to Actually Decide
How defined is your MVP scope? A focused, well-scoped MVP is exactly what a skilled freelancer is built for. A sprawling, multi-team-sized build leans toward an agency.
How much do you value direct access to the builder? If you want to be able to say "actually, let's change this" and have it happen that afternoon, a freelancer wins.
What's your budget reality? Freelancers typically stretch a tight MVP budget further, since you're not funding project management overhead on top of development.
How technical are you? Technical founders often prefer freelancers because they can evaluate quality directly. Non-technical founders sometimes value an agency's structure and accountability layer more.
A Real Example
Projects like Neighbors Trailer and Kenson Investments were both freelance engagements with a clearly scoped product vision — exactly the shape of project where working directly with one developer, instead of routing every decision through an account manager, kept things moving without the overhead a larger team would have added.
https://www.bilal-hashmi.dev/blog/freelancer-vs-agency-for-mvp.html
