When you hire a typical agency, you're not just paying for code. You're paying for the account manager who relays your messages, the project manager who schedules the people who relay your messages, and the markup on the junior developer who actually writes the code. By the time a decision reaches the person typing, it's been through three games of telephone.
The hidden tax
Every layer adds two costs: money and latency. The money is obvious, someone has to pay those salaries, and it's you. The latency is worse. A question that an engineer could answer in thirty seconds becomes a two-day round trip through Slack, a status meeting, and a "let me check with the team."
That latency is where projects quietly die. Scope drifts because nobody with full context is steering. Estimates slip because the person making them isn't the person doing the work.
Working directly
When you talk to the engineer building it, the telephone game disappears. You ask a question, you get an answer, from the person who can actually act on it. Scope stays tight because one person holds the whole picture. Estimates are honest because they're made by the person on the hook for them.
That's the entire model here: tight scope, weekly delivery, no handoffs. Not because it's a nice slogan, but because removing the layers is the cheapest performance win there is.
What to look for
Whoever you hire, ask one question: who will I actually be talking to during the project? If the answer isn't "the person writing the code," you already know where your budget is going.