What is staff augmentation?
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Placing external engineers into your existing team, under your management, working your backlog. You keep accountability for delivery; the supplier provides vetted people. It typically costs $22–$45 per hour per engineer at Indian agency rates.
What is a managed team?
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A pod — usually three to four people including QA and a named delivery owner — that takes a defined scope and is accountable for delivering it. It runs $12,000–$20,000 a month and does not require engineering management on your side.
Which is cheaper?
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Per engineer, augmentation. All-in, it depends on whether you have management capacity: if you do not, the cost of augmentation shows up as delay and rework rather than as invoice, and a managed team is usually cheaper in outcome terms.
Can we start with one model and switch?
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Yes, and the common path is a managed team owning an area first, then augmentation once you have hired internal leadership. The reverse also happens — augmentation converted to a managed pod after a manager leaves.
What is the most common failure mode?
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Buying augmentation with nobody to manage it. The engineers wait for direction, the client assumes progress is happening, and both sides discover the gap at the end of a quarter. Naming who runs the sprint before signing prevents almost all of it.
