Flat-rate dev subscriptions vs a senior hire: the math nobody runs honestly

Unlimited dev subscriptions keep getting compared to senior hires on sticker price, and the comparison is broken before it starts.

The hire math people quote is base salary. The hire math that matters is fully loaded: benefits (~35%), payroll taxes (~15%), bonus (~15%), retirement match (~8%), on top of a ~$120K base, plus ~$13,500 in recruiting and setup. Glassdoor-based averages put an average US senior software engineer around $18,290/month that way. That's the real line item.

The subscription side gets misquoted too. "Unlimited requests" sounds like a firehose until you read the workflow: one active request at a time, delivered one by one on a shared Trello board, code landing in a private GitHub repo you keep, revisions until you approve the card. Poket Dev runs that model at $5,995/month with a 72-hour turnaround claim. The honest version of the comparison looks like this:

1. Steady backlog of well-scoped tickets (automation, integrations, scrapers, data pipelines, cloud setup): subscription wins on cost, roughly $161K/year against the loaded hire.
2. Need a person in synchronous communication all day: hire. A queue is not a pager.
3. Somewhere in between: do the division yourself. If your monthly workload is under ~70 hours of senior-level work, the per-hour math stops favoring the flat fee.

The uncomfortable part for the subscription side: if your requests aren't well-scoped, the queue eats you. The same one-at-a-time structure that makes flat-rate economics work also means vague tickets sit at the front of the line. That failure mode is real and nobody's marketing mentions it.

I keep a shortlist of these flat-rate shops and their published numbers at poketdev.com if you want to check the math yourself.