Outsourced vs in-house design department: cost, speed and skill

Most companies never really ask whether they need design. They ask how to get it: put a designer on the payroll, or hand the whole visual side to an outside partner. The honest answer depends on three things, what it costs, how fast it moves, and how much of the work one person can actually do well. Here is the comparison with all three laid out.

The salary is the smallest part of the bill

An in-house designer does not cost their salary. On top of gross pay you carry employer contributions, paid holiday, sick days, software licences, hardware, the cost of recruiting in the first place, and the manager hours spent briefing and reviewing. None of that appears in the job ad.

• Employer social contributions on top of gross pay, which across the EU commonly add a fifth or more
• Paid holiday and public holidays: roughly a month a year when nothing ships
• Sick days and parental leave, with nobody covering behind them
• Software: Creative Cloud, fonts, stock and plugins, per seat, every month
• Hardware: a capable machine and a colour-accurate display, replaced every few years
• Recruitment: agency fees or weeks of your own time, repeated if the hire does not work out
• Onboarding: the first months are spent learning your brand, not producing at full speed
• Quiet months: a slow February costs exactly the same as a launch week

Put rough numbers on it. A mid-level designer on 2,000 EUR gross already lands near 2,500 EUR once contributions are counted, and closer to 2,700 EUR once software and hardware are amortised, before a single file is delivered. Spread recruitment and the unproductive ramp-up across the first year and the true first-year cost is higher again. That is the figure to compare against, not the salary.

Speed: the queue of one

In-house feels faster because the designer sits in the room. In practice one designer is a queue of one: everything waits behind whatever they already have open. When they are on holiday, ill, or working their notice, the queue stops completely.

An outsourced department is a team behind a single senior contact. Small changes come back the same day, bigger work is scoped and scheduled, and nothing halts because one person is away. The same partner holds your files and your history, so nobody re-explains the brand each time.

• Same-day turnaround on small edits, over email or WhatsApp
• No onboarding gap: senior output from the first week
• No single point of failure when somebody is away
• Templates and systems so your own team ships routine items without waiting at all

Competence: nobody is strong at everything

This is where an in-house hire quietly costs the most. A growing brand needs identity, print and packaging, presentations, social content, web, UI, motion, 3D and product imagery. No single designer is genuinely strong across all of it, so you either accept weak work in the gaps or buy those pieces outside anyway, on top of the salary you are already paying.

• Brand identity and brand books
• Print, packaging and large-format production
• Investor and corporate presentations
• Social content and campaign creative
• Websites, UI and product design
• Motion, 3D and product imagery

An outsourced department gives you that whole range at senior level for one fee, plus the strategic head that decides what the business actually needs next. That is the core of how we work as your outsourced design department.

Where hiring in-house genuinely wins

It would be dishonest to say never hire. In-house is the right call when the volume is genuinely daily and predictable, when the designer has to sit inside a product team shipping continuously, when confidentiality rules out outside partners, or when the culture depends on that person being in the room. If that describes you, hire, and hire well.

Side by side

• Cost: salary plus contributions, software, hardware, recruitment and idle months, against one predictable monthly fee
• Speed: a queue of one that stops on holiday, against same-day edits and no single point of failure
• Breadth: strong in a few disciplines, against the full visual stack at senior level
• Risk: months lost if the hire is wrong, against a partner you can pause
• Ramp-up: months of onboarding, against output in the first week

Which one fits you

If your design need is steady but varied, a growing restaurant group, a sports club, a company that pitches often, a brand living across menus, social, print and decks, an outsourced department costs less and delivers more than a single hire. If it is daily, uniform and embedded in a product team, hire. We work this way with companies in Latvia, across the EU, in Cyprus and the UAE. See everything we produce, browse selected work, or tell us what you need.