Compare
Autopilot vs. hiring a developer
A senior hire is three to six months of recruiting, $200k+ fully loaded, and one person’s bandwidth. Autopilot is live in 30 days for a flat fee — a whole engine behind a senior pilot — and it runs your app too.
Side by side
Honestly, side by side.
| hiring a developer | Autopilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to productive | 3–6 months to hire, then weeks to ramp on your codebase. | v0 in 30 days. Requests flowing from week one. |
| Cost | $200k+ fully loaded — salary, benefits, taxes, equity, tooling. | From $7,500/mo, flat. Cancel at end of term. |
| Capacity | One person, one thing at a time — plus PTO and sick days. | An engine plus a pilot. Unlimited queue. Never out sick. |
| Continuity | Bus factor of one. They leave, the knowledge leaves. | Documented, backed up, and run by a team. |
| Running it | The same dev context-switches to firefight outages. | 24/7 monitoring, backups, and CVE patching included. |
| Downside risk | A bad hire costs six months and a salary. | v0 in 30 days or next month’s free. |
The difference
One salary buys one person. This buys a team’s output.
The cost of a single developer, for the output of a team — that also runs your software around the clock. Run your own numbers and see the gap.
Priced in the open
The price is the price.
- No hourly billing.
- No surprise invoices.
- No change-order games.
Flat monthly numbers, published on this page. What you see is the whole deal.
The numbers
Questions
Straight answers.
A fully-loaded senior developer runs well over $200k a year once you add benefits, taxes, tooling, recruiting, and management. Autopilot starts at $7,500/mo flat and also runs your app. Try the cost calculator to see your own numbers.
For most scale-up roadmaps, one to three build lanes replace the day-to-day delivery of a small team. You keep product direction; Ramjet and your pilot handle the building and shipping.
Great — your code transfers to you, fully documented, so an in-house team can pick it up cleanly whenever you’re ready.