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Comment by greatpostman | Hacker News Reader

Mind if I ask how much profit you make from that revenue? What’s the margins like when running a small dev team?

Not at all, we just finished our financial year and it was 14% operating profit.

The previous year was 29%, but last year was lower as I made some expensive decisions during the COVID period. Basically, I grabbed all the revenue opportunities I could without too much concern for profit

Would love to know that as well. I have worked with few agencies as a contractor. From what I heard it is very hard to have a decent margin doing software dev work unless you have offshore subcontractor connections or an offshore office. When you have a downturn it could be brutal with an onshore team.

You're right about the downturn, it's impossible to run a team for long without a full order book. That said, I think you'd have this problem for an offshore team too, perhaps with a much longer "sat on hands" cash runway.

I have a friend who's set up an offshore team and he saves 70% on developer salaries from what I can infer.

We employ within Europe and the UK, our average dev salary is around $65,000.

I forgot you are based in UK.

I don't think you are saving much by hiring outside of Europe or even UK. Many people had their fair share of trouble with Ukraine. Even a qualified latam dev's full time salary averages out at USD 30-40/hour.

Being in UK is perfect for an agency.

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