Build your app in-house or outsource to a studio

Short answer

Building your mobile team in-house is expensive to start (12 to 18 months before a team is fully productive) and it eats your founder time. Outsourcing to a studio costs more per unit of cash but gets you an MVP in 4 to 8 weeks, with no hiring burden and mature expertise on day one. For the first 24 months of a startup or small company launching its first mobile product, outsourcing is almost always the right call. Going in-house makes sense once mobile becomes the main product and the roadmap runs past 18 months of continuous work.

What an in-house mobile team really costs

Plenty of founders compare a mobile dev's monthly salary against a studio quote and jump to a conclusion: "a full-time dev at €5k gross costs me €70k a year, a studio charges €25k for an MVP, so in-house is cheaper." That's wrong the moment you look at the real line items.

The true cost of a senior React Native developer, fully loaded over 12 months:

Loaded gross salary: €70k to €90k.
Recruitment: €15k to €25k (agency fee or the equivalent in your own time).
Onboarding and non-productive first three months: €15k to €20k equivalent.
Tooling, hardware, subscriptions (Mac, Apple Developer, Expo, monitoring): €3k to €5k.
Management by the founder or a CTO: at least 1 to 2 days a week, so €15k to €25k equivalent.

Realistic first-year total for a single dev: €120k to €165k.

And one dev alone doesn't ship a clean MVP. With no designer and no QA, the timeline stretches and quality drops. A minimal team (1 senior dev, 0.5 designer, 0.3 PM) runs closer to €200k to €280k in year one.

What a studio costs for the same scope

An MVP delivered by a studio: €7,500 to €25,000 for something shippable in 4 to 8 weeks. Add €10k to €20k a year of optional maintenance if you want the studio to stay on the project.

Pure arithmetic for the first 12 months: €25k to €50k with a studio, versus €200k to €280k in-house. Difference: €150k to €250k less to get an MVP in hand, plus 12 months of runway saved.

When going in-house pays off

The math flips around year two, under three conditions that all have to be true at once:

Mobile has become the main product, not one feature among many.
The mobile roadmap represents at least 18 months of visible, continuous work.
The in-house team is more than 2 full-time people (otherwise the single-point-of-failure risk is too high).

In that situation, going in-house lets you compound product knowledge, shorten decision cycles, and absorb the roadmap without a variable invoice each month.

If you don't meet all three conditions, outsourcing stays the rational choice, even in year two.

The traps of hiring too early

Hiring before validation. Building a team before you have a validated MVP means paying full price for people coding an app nobody wants. You spend €200k to discover the market doesn't exist.

Hiring badly. The market for senior React Native developers is tight. You might spend 3 to 6 months searching, settle for an average profile out of fatigue, and end up with a dev who can't ship on their own.

Underestimating management. A lone dev needs a manager, a product owner, and a peer. Without that, they drift, quality slips, and eventually they leave. So you pay for 1.5 FTE to get 1 useful FTE.

Becoming a hostage to your own team. If your only mobile dev decides to leave, your product stalls. The bus factor of a one-person mobile team is brutal.

The traps of badly run outsourcing

Picking the cheapest. A studio charging €4,000 for an MVP delivers a €4,000 MVP: ugly, fragile, no tests. You'll pay double to redo it.

Not locking the scope. Without strict scoping, the studio bills every addition as a change order. The final invoice can double.

Not demanding the source code. Without an explicit transfer, you don't own your product. The studio can hold you hostage on every future change. At Inyka, the code is transferred to the client in the contract, every time.

Vanishing after delivery. If you don't run production follow-up after launch, you'll discover your bugs by reading 1-star reviews on the store. Keep a maintenance budget of 5% to 15% of the initial cost per year.

The hybrid model that works well

The optimal path for a startup or small company's first 24 months:

Phase 1 (0-6 months): the studio ships the MVP. You test, you learn, you validate. The studio transfers the code at the end of the engagement.

Phase 2 (6-18 months): maintenance and light iterations with the studio. You pay a monthly envelope (5 to 20 days a month) for fixes, small changes, and targeted additions. No in-house team yet.

Phase 3 (18 months and beyond): hire your first in-house dev if the roadmap stays dense. The studio handles the handover, pairs on the code, transfers product knowledge.

This model protects the first 18 months, when you're still learning your market. It avoids the classic mistake of hiring too early.

The question you actually need to ask

Before deciding, answer these 4 questions honestly:

How much runway do you have? If it's under 18 months, outsourcing preserves it and going in-house burns it.
Do you already have a CTO in-house who can lead and hire a mobile dev? If not, going in-house without a solid CTO is risky.
Will your mobile product keep evolving continuously for 24 months? If not, going in-house means paying a team that runs out of work after 6 months.
Have you already validated that your product has a market? If not, hiring before validation is the most expensive mistake there is.

If you answer no to even one of these four, outsourcing is the safer bet.

How we see it at Inyka

Inyka ships MVPs and first versions in 4 to 6 weeks at a fixed price, with the code transferred to the client. The angle: be your outsourced mobile team through the 12 to 18 months where hiring in-house would be a waste, then support the handover once you're ready to bring on your first dev.