As a B2B company grows, design and web stop being a project and become a stream: ads every week, a landing page for each webinar, a sales deck that goes stale, the October trade show, the pricing page that needs a redo. That's when the usual question shows up: do we hire, find an agency or try a subscription team?
There's no universal answer, but there is one question that frames the rest: how much recurring design and web work do you have every week, and how much context does it need?
1. In-house team
Hiring your own designers and developers gives you the most context. They're in the meetings, they know the product and the customers, and they can react the same day.
It fits when there's steady work for a full-time role and someone with judgment to lead it. If design is part of the product, as with product design or user experience, it almost always belongs inside.
What's usually underestimated:
- The total cost goes far beyond salary: payroll taxes, hiring, tools, training and the time of whoever manages them.
- One person rarely covers everything: someone who makes great ads doesn't always build a great website, and someone who codes pages doesn't always design.
- Turnover: when someone leaves, the context leaves with them.
There's a very common variant that rarely gets recognised as a model: hiring nobody and spreading the website across people already on the team, like a product developer, the marketing lead or the CTO reviewing. It looks free because no invoice arrives, but it isn't; we do the math in what building your website in-house really costs.
2. Project-based agency
An agency brings a full team and experience from many clients. It works very well for work with a clear start and end: a rebrand, a new website, a big campaign.
It fits when the work is one-off, large and well defined.
What's usually underestimated:
- Every request goes through a brief, a quote and an approval. For small, frequent pieces, the process costs more than the piece.
- Context gets lost between projects: you have to explain the brand, the product and the audience all over again.
- After launch, the website needs maintenance and new pages, and that rarely fits into the project.
3. Subscription team
In this model, known as Design as a Service or, more broadly, as a productized agency, you pay a fixed monthly fee for an external team that works continuously through a queue of requests.
That queue usually lives on a shared board, often a kanban with columns like "to do", "in progress" and "in review". That way everyone can see what's being worked on, what's next and where something is stuck. If you've never worked this way, Atlassian has a good introduction to the kanban method.
It fits when there's a constant flow of small and medium pieces, and not enough volume or stability to hire.
What's usually underestimated:
- Not all services are equal: it matters how many tasks are worked on in parallel, who reviews before delivery and whether the people are senior.
- The external team needs access and context. If nobody gives feedback, the pace drops.
The comparison that matters
- Context: highest in-house; it builds up over time with a subscription; it starts from zero with each agency project.
- Cost: fixed and high in-house; variable and per job with an agency; fixed and adjustable month to month with a subscription.
- Speed for small pieces: high in-house and with a subscription; low with an agency because of the quoting process.
- Capacity for large projects: agencies usually win; a small in-house team gets swamped.
- Way of working: an agency works in closed projects with a fixed scope and deadline, much like what Shape Up proposes; a continuous team, in-house or by subscription, works best with a prioritised queue of requests that empties and refills every week.
What many established B2B tech companies do: combine
In practice, few companies pick a single model. A common pattern is one person inside with judgment, often in marketing or product, who knows the brand and makes the calls; a continuous team, in-house or by subscription, for the weekly flow; and an agency for large, one-off projects such as a rebrand.
The decision isn't so much who designs as who holds the judgment. That role should always sit inside the company.
Three questions to decide
- If you add up the pieces from the last three months, is there work for one full-time person every week?
- Who inside the company reviews and makes design decisions today? If the answer is "nobody", no model will fully work.
- Is the bottleneck capacity (not enough hands) or judgment (nobody knows what to ask for)? Capacity can be bought; judgment has to be built.
Disclosure: Little offers the third model, a subscription design and development team. We've tried to describe all three with the same honesty.
