Upwork, Fiverr, or a team like ours — an honest guide

It depends almost entirely on budget and scope. Under roughly £5,000, a marketplace gig is usually the better deal — an agency's overhead would eat your budget for little benefit. Between £5,000 and £12,000, one carefully vetted senior freelancer can work well if you manage them closely. From £12,000–£30,000 and up — a real product with a backend, payments or users depending on it — a named team with published prices, code review and milestone billing is normally the safer buy. Our page comparing Upwork with a software agency walks through the trade-offs in detail.

In our experience the crossover sits around £12,000. Below that, the process a good agency wraps around a build — scoping, code review, project management, QA — costs more than it saves, and a marketplace gig or a single freelancer is the rational choice. Our MVP work runs £12,000–£30,000 depending on scope (all prices ex VAT, published in our Open Price Book), and it is at that scale that accountability, continuity and tested code start paying for themselves.

No. Upwork's escrow and milestone system is genuinely good buyer protection — we recommend milestone billing ourselves — and for budgets under about £5,000 a marketplace is usually the right tool, not a compromise. Fiverr's productised gigs are hard to beat for small, well-defined tasks. Our argument is narrower: once a project needs several skill sets, months of continuity and someone accountable for the whole outcome, the marketplace model starts working against you.

A fair question. Three answers: we publish fixed price bands, so you can check our claims against our own numbers; each comparison names the cases where the marketplace wins, in plain terms; and we turn away work that fits a marketplace better, because a mismatched project costs us more in reputation than it earns in fees. Read the pages with scepticism — they are built to survive it.