| What you are buying | One integration, built and kept alive. Scope written down before anyone is paid. | A bench across strategy, content and design. Most are marketing shops, and the engineering is subcontracted. | One person, one bounded job, no cover. | An engineer whose HubSpot work is one line on a longer roadmap. |
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| What you pay | $7,500 to build, then $2,000/mo. $29,500 in year one, fixed before we start. | A retainer priced off an hourly card. You are quoted a range, and ranges move. | Hourly. Upwork's published median for HubSpot freelancers is $25/hr, but that is portal cleanup, not API engineering. | Salary and benefits, plus months of hiring before the first line of code. |
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| Time to live | 14 days from signed scope and working credentials. | Weeks to contract and start, then a project plan. | Days to start, then whatever their other clients allow. | Months to hire, then weeks to ramp on your stack. |
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| Who owns the code | You do. Your repo, your credentials, your hosting, from day one. | Often theirs unless the contract says otherwise. Ask first. | Their infrastructure, their token, and eighteen months later nobody can reach them. | Yours, until the person who wrote it leaves. |
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| Who is accountable when it breaks | We are. Monitoring is in the retainer, so you should hear it from us first. | A ticket, and an account manager between you and the builder. | Whoever answers, at whatever rate they quote that week. | Whoever is free, once the sprint allows it. |
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| If it does not work | Not live in 14 days and there is no invoice. | A change order. | Another invoice. | Sunk. |
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