Founders often face the same fork: hire a full-time developer, or find another way to ship. Neither option is universally “better.” The right choice depends on how steady your demand is, how much parallel work you need, and whether you want flexibility to pause when the product goes quiet.
This article compares a software development subscription (Shipasub) with hiring a full-time senior developer, using only the cost frame published on the site—and a practical checklist you can apply without inventing savings percentages.
When a subscription fits vs when a hire fits
Choose a subscription when:
- Work arrives in bursts (launches, integrations, fixes) rather than every day year-round.
- You need senior full-stack help across web apps, APIs, landings, automations, databases, and deployments—without standing up a recruiting process.
- You want a flat monthly fee and the ability to pause or cancel.
- One focused request at a time is enough throughput for your stage.
- You value a shared task board (Trello or Linear) with full visibility.
Choose a full-time hire when:
- You need daily dedicated capacity on your product.
- Multiple workstreams must move in parallel every week.
- You want someone embedded in your rituals, culture, and long-term ownership of a large codebase.
- Ramp time and management overhead are acceptable costs of building an internal team.
A subscription is ongoing engineering capacity you can start and pause. A hire is a person on your team. Those are different tools.
Cost frame (from the Shipasub FAQ only)
Shipasub is priced at $899 USD per month. Pause or cancel anytime; no contracts.
On hiring, the site’s FAQ is explicit and limited: a senior full-stack developer typically costs $100k–$150k+ per year, plus benefits, taxes, and recruiting costs. That is the full comparison frame used here—no invented salary tables, no claimed “save X%” math.
What that frame implies in practice:
- A hire is the right spend when you will use that person most working days of the year.
- A subscription is the right spend when you need senior shipping without committing to a full annual employment package.
- Recruiting and ramp are real costs of hiring that do not appear on a subscription invoice.
If your roadmap needs a dedicated owner inside the company, hire. If your roadmap needs reliable external senior capacity with an off switch, subscribe. See pricing for the current plan details.
Flexibility: pause, cancel, and banked days
Subscriptions win on flexibility when demand is uneven.
Shipasub billing cycles are 31-day periods. Unused days bank. Example: use 20 days, pause, and keep 11 days banked for later. You are not forced to “use it or lose it” every calendar month in the same rigid way employment works.
You can also cancel anytime with no lock-in, and restart later if needs change. That matters for solo founders and small teams who ship hard for a quarter, then go heads-down on sales or fundraising.
A full-time hire does not pause cleanly. Employment continues whether the backlog is full or thin. That stability is valuable when demand is steady—and expensive when demand is not.
Tradeoffs of one-at-a-time delivery
Shipasub includes unlimited requests in the queue, shipped one at a time, with average ~48-hour delivery for most requests (complex work may take longer; expectations are set upfront), and unlimited revisions until you are satisfied.
Tradeoffs to weigh honestly:
- Pros of sequential shipping: clear focus, predictable communication, higher quality per request, less context switching.
- Cons of sequential shipping: if you need three features in flight every day, a single sequential queue will feel slow compared with an internal team.
- Queue management is on you: prioritization matters. The board shows everything; order decides what ships next.
Who does the work matters for this tradeoff. Aneudy Abreu is a founder-engineer with 10+ years shipping production software—React, Node, Python, databases, APIs, and cloud—with no junior bench and no outsourcing. One senior engineer, focused, is different from a junior bench spinning many tickets.
For scope boundaries (what is included and what is not), read what’s included in a Shipasub subscription. For how the model works end to end, see software development as a subscription. Background on the founder: About.
A simple checklist
Use this as a decision aid—not a sales script.
- Demand: Is engineering needed most weeks of the year, or in bursts?
- Parallelism: Do you need one active stream or many concurrent streams?
- Cost structure: Can you absorb $100k–$150k+ per year plus benefits, taxes, and recruiting—or do you prefer $899/mo with pause?
- Scope: Is the work mostly web/API/landing/automation/DB/deploy—or heavy native, video, 3D, or enterprise infra?
- Ownership: Do you need an employee embedded in the company, or senior shipping capacity with a shared board?
- Flexibility: Do you need to pause for weeks without carrying full payroll?
If answers lean toward bursts, one stream, flat monthly cost, and pause—subscription. If answers lean toward daily capacity, parallel work, and deep internal ownership—hire.
Next step
Still unsure? A short call is often enough to map your backlog to the model.
- Book 15 minutes: https://cal.com/aneudyac/15min
- Subscribe: https://buy.stripe.com/00wbJ1bPXalZgrAbRq0x200
- Site: https://www.shipasub.com
A software subscription and a full-time hire solve different problems. Pick the one that matches how your product actually needs to ship—not the one that sounds more impressive on a slide.