When you need .NET development work done, you typically have three options: hire full-time, use an agency, or hire a freelancer. Here's why freelance developers are increasingly the smart choice for project-based work, and how to get the most out of the engagement.
Cost Comparison
A senior .NET developer in the UK commands £65,000–£85,000 in salary alone. Add employer NI (15% from ), pension contributions, benefits, equipment, office space, management overhead, and recruitment fees (typically 15–20% of salary), and you're looking at £90,000–£120,000 per year for a single developer. That's a significant commitment before they've written a line of code.
An agency charges £600–£1,000 per day for a senior .NET contractor. The agency takes a significant margin — often 30 to 50 percent — so the developer actually doing the work might be earning £400–£600 while the agency adds overhead without adding value to the code itself. You're also dependent on the agency's bench: if their best developer is on another project, you get whoever's available.
A freelancer charges £400–£600 per day with no overhead, no notice period, and no commitment beyond the project. The full rate goes to the developer, so you're more likely to attract genuine senior talent who can charge a premium based on their reputation rather than being commoditised through an agency.
For a 3-month project, the maths is clear. Full-time hire: approximately £30,000 in total employment costs (plus 3 months to recruit before work starts). Agency: £36,000–£60,000. Freelancer: £24,000–£36,000 — and they can start next week. The freelancer option is typically 20 to 40 percent cheaper than an agency and comparable to or less than the total cost of employment for a full-time hire, without any of the ongoing commitment.
Speed to Start
Recruiting a full-time senior .NET developer takes 2 to 4 months in the current market. That's time to write the job spec, post to job boards, screen applications, conduct technical interviews (usually two to three rounds), check references, make an offer, negotiate terms, and wait for the candidate to serve their notice period. In a competitive market, your first-choice candidate might accept another offer while you're completing internal approvals.
An agency needs 2 to 4 weeks to source someone, but they're drawing from the same talent pool with the same supply constraints. If you need a niche specialism — Azure migrations for government, legacy .NET Framework modernisation, or Entity Framework performance optimisation — the agency's general database of contractors may not have what you need.
A good freelancer can start within days. They've already demonstrated their expertise through their portfolio, blog, and previous client work. There's no screening process on the agency side, no margin negotiation, and no bench management. You find someone with the right experience, agree terms, and start work.
Expertise on Demand
Full-time hires need to be generalists to some degree — they'll work on whatever the team needs, from fixing CSS bugs to configuring Azure infrastructure to writing database migrations. That's appropriate for a permanent role, but it means they're good at many things rather than exceptional at the specific thing you need right now.
Freelancers specialise. Need someone who's done Azure migrations for UK government? You can find exactly that person, with a track record of doing exactly that work. Need Entity Framework performance optimisation on a database with millions of records? There's a freelancer who does it weekly. You get depth of expertise that's nearly impossible to find in a generalist hire.
This specialisation also means freelancers bring patterns and knowledge from multiple organisations. A full-time developer at one company sees one set of problems and solutions. A freelancer who's worked across ten organisations has seen ten different approaches to similar problems and knows which ones work. They bring architectural patterns, tool recommendations, and process improvements that your internal team might never discover independently.
For public sector organisations in particular, finding developers with experience in both .NET and government-specific requirements (G-Cloud procurement, PSN compliance, OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE data handling, GDS service standards) is challenging through traditional recruitment. Specialist freelancers who focus on government work are often the fastest route to getting the right expertise.
Lower Risk
If a full-time hire doesn't work out, you're looking at performance improvement plans, notice periods (typically 1 to 3 months for senior developers), and potentially months before you can try again. The employment tribunal risk means the exit process has to be managed carefully, and the cost of a failed hire — recruitment fees, salary during the notice period, management time, and the opportunity cost of the delayed project — can easily reach £30,000 to £50,000.
With a freelancer, the contract has clear deliverables and timelines. If it's not working after the first week or two, you wrap up and move on. No HR process required, no notice period beyond what's in the contract (typically one or two weeks), and no ongoing obligation. The financial risk is capped at the value of work completed.
Many freelancers, including myself, offer a trial period — a paid first week where either party can walk away if the fit isn't right. This eliminates the biggest risk of any engagement: committing significant budget to someone who turns out to be a poor match for the team, the technology, or the organisational culture.
What to Expect From a Good Freelancer
A good freelancer should be productive from day one or two. They should be able to read a codebase, understand the architecture, and start contributing without extensive onboarding. If a freelancer needs two weeks to get up to speed, they're either not experienced enough or the codebase has serious documentation issues (which is useful information in itself).
Expect clear communication about progress, blockers, and decisions. Good freelancers over-communicate rather than going quiet for days. They'll flag risks early, ask questions when requirements are ambiguous, and push back when they think you're making a mistake — not just silently implement whatever they're told.
You should also expect documentation and clean handover. The freelancer's work should be understandable and maintainable by your team after they leave. This means clean code with sensible naming, comments where the intent isn't obvious, architecture decision records for significant choices, and a handover session where they walk the team through what was built and why.
How to Find the Right One
Look for specific experience relevant to your project, not just years of experience. Ten years of building CRUD applications doesn't qualify someone for a complex Azure migration. Ask for examples of similar work — case studies, portfolio pieces, or references from previous clients who had a similar project.
Check their GitHub or portfolio. A freelancer with a public body of work — blog posts, open source contributions, or portfolio projects — demonstrates competence in a way that a CV cannot. If they write about the technologies you need, they probably know them well. If their blog post about Azure migrations includes specific technical details and practical advice, they've done it before.
Do a paid trial before committing to a full project. A small initial task — a one-week sprint, a technical spike, or a codebase assessment — gives both parties a chance to evaluate the fit with minimal risk. Pay for the trial at full rate; asking for free work is a red flag that good freelancers will avoid.
And talk to their previous clients. References matter more than CVs in freelance work. A client who says "they delivered on time, communicated well, and left us with code we could maintain" tells you more than any technical assessment.
When Not to Freelance
If you need someone permanently, hire permanently. The long-term cost of employment is lower than ongoing freelance rates, and you benefit from accumulated institutional knowledge and team continuity. If you need a team of 5 or more developers, an agency might coordinate the delivery better than managing multiple independent freelancers. And if your project requires deep institutional knowledge that takes months to acquire — understanding complex business rules, navigating internal politics, or managing stakeholder relationships across the organisation — a short-term freelancer might not be the best fit.
Freelancing also doesn't work well when the scope is genuinely undefined. If you don't know what you're building, a freelancer on a daily rate will burn through budget while you figure it out. In these cases, start with a discovery phase — a short, focused engagement to define the problem and scope the solution — before committing to a longer build engagement.
But for defined projects with clear scope, specific technology requirements, and a fixed timeline? Freelance is hard to beat on cost, speed, and expertise.
Interested?
I'm a senior .NET and Azure developer with 9 years of experience across UK local government. I specialise in Azure migration, legacy modernisation, custom .NET development, and team augmentation. If you have a project that needs senior expertise without the overhead of a full-time hire or agency, get in touch for a free 30-minute discovery call.