Who is RG INSYS not the right fit for?

Heavily regulated workloads requiring an active ISO 27001 or SOC 2 report today. Our SOC 2 Type 1 audit is in active progress with a CPA firm, target completion Q4 2026; Type 2 follows after that. ISO 27001 is on the 2027 roadmap. We are also not the right fit for pure staff augmentation with no architecture oversight, on-site-only engagements, or 24x7 NOC operations. We partner for those.

How does RG INSYS compare to hiring an in-house UK senior engineer?

Approximately £24 per hour vs £75 per hour fully loaded. Around £42,000 per year vs £100,000 (salary plus 33% on-costs). 1-2 weeks to start vs 8-16 weeks of recruitment. Replaceable in two weeks via our continuity engineer; in-house typically requires 3-6 months of notice and handover.

How does RG INSYS differ from a freelancer or Upwork hire?

Senior pair-programming interview plus a two-week trial vs platform reviews. A pod with a backup engineer for continuity instead of a single point of failure. Dedicated PM included. 80%+ test coverage as standard. IP assigned via MSA, not platform terms.

How does RG INSYS differ from traditional offshore firms?

Minimum one engineer vs typical 5-10 person teams. Month-to-month commitment vs 6-12 month MSAs with ramp. AI-native modern stack vs legacy-heavy and waterfall-influenced. Per-engineer rate $25-30/hr vs $40-60/hr including bench overhead. PM and senior engineer on call within four hours, no hierarchical escalation.

RG INSYS vs In-House, Freelance & Traditional Offshore

What we don't do

We get the most respect from clients when we say no to work that doesn't fit. Here is what we are not the right partner for, today:

Heavily regulated workloads needing an active SOC 2 or ISO 27001 report today. Our SOC 2 Type 1 audit is in active progress with a CPA firm, target completion Q4 2026; Type 2 follows after that. ISO 27001 is on the 2027 roadmap. We do not yet hold a SOC 2 report of our own. If your procurement team requires a current Type 1 or Type 2 report, or an ISO 27001 certificate, to sign, we are not the right fit until that work completes. We will say so on the first call. See our compliance page for the full honest map.
Pure "staff aug" fire-and-forget headcount. If you want to drop a contractor into a Jira queue with no architectural oversight, no PM, and no test standards, that is not how we operate. Our engineers come with a senior reviewer and a PM attached by default; you cannot peel those away and pay less.
On-site-only engagements. We are remote-first. We can fly to your office for kick-offs, quarterly reviews, or critical incidents, but our team works from India. If your contract requires daily on-site presence, we are not it.
24×7 NOC operations. We provide on-call rotations for the software we build, including weekend and out-of-hours response for incidents. We are not a 24×7 network operations centre. For follow-the-sun NOC coverage we partner with specialist providers and integrate cleanly with their tooling.

If any of the above describes your need, tell us — we'll either flag it on the first call or recommend a partner who fits better. That's a better outcome for everyone than starting work we can't finish well.

RG INSYS vs hiring an in-house UK senior engineer

The cleanest comparison for UK clients evaluating us. We've used a fully-loaded UK senior cost (not just salary) so the numbers reflect what shows up in your accounts.

Dimension	In-house UK senior	RG INSYS senior
Hourly cost	~£75/hr fully loaded	~£24/hr
Annual cost	~£100,000 (£75k salary + 33% on-costs: employer NI, pension, equipment, office, recruitment amortised)	~£42,000
Time to start	8–16 weeks recruitment	1–2 weeks
Replaceable in 2 weeks	No — typical notice + handover 3–6 months	Yes — continuity engineer ready
AI tooling included	Varies — depends on hire's habits and your licensing	Yes — Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot standard
PTO & sickness backfill	No — work stops	Yes — continuity engineer covers
Performance ramp	Standard 90-day plan, hard to exit early	2-week trial; exit at any point with 2 weeks notice
Where they sit	Your office (or fully remote, depending on contract)	Remote, embedded in your standups and tooling

Where in-house still wins: deep tacit knowledge from being in the same room, attending the all-hands, and overhearing the customer call. We don't pretend that gap is zero. For most engineering work it's smaller than the cost gap.

RG INSYS vs a freelancer or Upwork hire

Freelance marketplaces are great when you need one specific deliverable and you have the in-house ability to spec, manage, and review it. They struggle when continuity, IP, and quality matter.

Dimension	Freelancer / Upwork	RG INSYS
Vetting	Platform reviews, hard to verify code quality	Senior pair-programming interview + 2-week free trial
Continuity	Single point of failure if they disappear	Pod with backup engineer, knowledge documented as standard
Project management	Your responsibility entirely	Dedicated PM included, no extra cost
QA & test coverage	Varies wildly — sometimes none	80%+ coverage standard, enforced in CI
IP & code ownership	Depends on platform terms; often messy at handover	Assigned outright via signed MSA
Compliance support	Varies wildly per individual	GDPR / UK GDPR / HIPAA-aware, DPA available
Security practice	Often no SAST, no secret scanning, no dependency review	Semgrep + Snyk + Trivy + gitleaks in CI
Handover at end	Often none — knowledge walks out the door	Full documentation, README, runbooks, video walkthrough

Where freelancers still win: very small, well-specified jobs you can fully define in a paragraph. If the task is "convert this Figma to a single static page" and you have an engineer to review the result, a freelancer is probably the right call. For anything that ships to production and runs for years, that economics flips.

RG INSYS vs a traditional offshore firm

Large traditional offshore firms (think TCS, Infosys, Wipro and their many regional clones) do real work for very large customers. They are structured very differently from us, and that structure shows up in your bill and your delivery speed.

Dimension	Traditional offshore (TCS/Infosys-style)	RG INSYS
Minimum team size	Typically 5–10 engineers + leads + PM + tester	1 engineer
Minimum commitment	6–12 month MSA, plus ramp-up period before billing settles	1 month, month-to-month
Engineering culture	Legacy-heavy stacks, waterfall-influenced delivery, ticket-driven	AI-native, modern stack (Node, TS, React, Go, Python), trunk-based
Decision velocity	Hierarchical escalation: dev → lead → manager → account → you	PM + senior engineer on call within 4 hours, founder reachable
Per-engineer rate	$40–60/hr (includes bench overhead and management layers)	$25–30/hr
Tooling	Often locked to internal frameworks, slow to adopt new tools	Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, modern open-source by default
Lock-in	Typical 12-month MSAs, exit clauses with notice + handover fees	Month-to-month; code & credentials are yours, no exit fees
People you actually talk to	Account manager + delivery manager; engineers behind a wall	Engineers, PM, and founder directly in your Slack

Where traditional offshore still wins: very large, multi-year programmes with deep regulatory sign-off, mainframe interop, or thousand-engineer parallel streams. Those firms are built for FTSE 100 / Fortune 500 engagements. If that's your shape of work, we are happy to refer.

How to choose

Short heuristic:

🏢

Pick in-house when

The role is permanent, core to your product DNA, and you can wait 3+ months to hire. Best for founding engineers and tech leadership.

🧑‍💻

Pick a freelancer when

The job is small (under ~2 weeks), tightly specified, and you have an in-house engineer to spec and review it.

🏛️

Pick traditional offshore when

You need a 50+ engineer programme, deep regulatory cover (current SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 certificates today), or mainframe / legacy enterprise integration at scale.

⚡

Pick RG INSYS when

You need to ship a real product or modernise an existing one in months, not years. You want senior engineers using AI tooling, transparent month-to-month pricing, and an MSA you can read in 20 minutes.

RG INSYS vs the alternatives