Internal team or external
From when is hiring cheaper than buying days?
The cumulative cost of both options month by month, the crossover month, and how many hires the need justifies.
- ≈ 3 min
- Free calculation · AI commentary on request
- You leave with: The crossover month and how many hires are justified
The need, and the alternative
At steady state, once set-up is behind you.
Salary, contributions, tooling, management. Roughly 1.8× gross.
Paid in full, productive in part. The shortfall is bought externally meanwhile.
Over 24 months, hiring never becomes cheaper: the volume does not justify a post. Stay external, or grow the need before hiring.
The comparison
The figures above are computed and free. If you also want them read back to you — what they mean, what is specific to your sector, where to start — that is produced on request.
Cumulative cost
Internal starts higher — recruitment, then months paid in full for partial output — and catches up. The crossing is the answer.
The detail
| Line | Estimate |
|---|---|
| Set-up | |
Recruitmentoften omitted Agency fee or the internal time equivalent, plus onboarding. | €18,000 €8,000 — €35,000 |
External cover during ramp-upoften omitted 4 months paid in full for partial output; the shortfall is bought externally. | €13,200 |
| People | |
Loaded payroll (1 hire) €105,000/yr loaded per person. | €210,000 |
| Recurring | |
External over 24 months 8 d/month × €1100. | €211,200 |
The assumptions
Every figure above rests on these. The ones marked “assumption” have no external source: they are modelling choices, labelled so they can be argued with rather than mistaken for measurements.
- Loaded annual cost 105 000 €Observed
- Fully loaded annual cost of an AI/ML engineer in France — salary, employer contributions, tooling, workstation, management overhead.
- Ramp-up 4 monthsObserved
- Months before a hire is productive on your systems. Paid in full, delivering in part.
- Utilisation 70 %Assumption
- Share of a hire's time that lands on the AI work rather than on meetings, support and everything else an employee does.
- Working days 18/moisPublished
- Net of leave.
What the calculation does, what the AI does
Every figure on this page comes from a deterministic algorithm running in your browser: the same input always gives the same result, and nothing is sent to produce it. AI runs only afterwards, to write the commentary from those figures. It produces none of them — the format it fills has no numeric fields — and any sentence quoting a value the calculation did not produce is removed before display.
Where to go next
See all 19 tools →- Cost calculator
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