# Baked vs hiring a full-time designer

> How a design subscription with Baked compares with hiring your first full-time designer: cost, speed, range of skills and commitment.

Most founders weigh this first: hire a designer, or work with a studio. A great in-house designer is worth a lot. Here is how the two compare, and when each one makes sense.

## Cost
- Baked: A flat monthly plan: $8,999 a month for Basic, $12,000 for Pro. YC companies get 10% off ($8,099 or $10,800), and referrals take off another 10% each.
- Hiring a full-time designer: A salary plus benefits, equipment and tools, and the time it takes to recruit.

## Time to start
- Baked: Book a 30-min intro call, join your private Slack channel and drop in your first request as soon as you're in.
- Hiring a full-time designer: Sourcing, interviews, an offer and often a notice period before they start.

## Range of work
- Baked: Brand, product design (web and mobile), marketing sites, full-stack web apps, launch videos and pitch decks, in Framer or code. Full-stack dev is part of Pro.
- Hiring a full-time designer: One person's strengths. Brand, product, web, code and video rarely live in one hire.

## Speed
- Baked: Most requests are ready to review within a day. Basic gets 2–3 updates a week, Pro gets 3–4 updates a week.
- Hiring a full-time designer: Depends on one person's time, alongside meetings and the rest of the team's asks.

## Who does it
- Baked: Senior designers who have worked at Meta, Netflix, HubSpot and Expa, and been founding designers at 25+ startups.
- Hiring a full-time designer: The person you hire, with their own level of experience.

## Commitment
- Baked: No contracts. Pause or cancel any month.
- Hiring a full-time designer: A long-term role. Quiet months still cost the same.

## When Baked makes more sense
- You need brand, product, a site and launch work in the next few weeks, not after a hiring round.
- Design needs come in bursts: launches, fundraising, a new product.
- You want senior people across several skills without hiring several people.

## When hiring a full-time designer makes more sense
- Design is your product's edge every single day and you need someone in every product decision.
- You have a design leader ready to manage and grow them.
- You're building a design team for the long run. You can also do both: Baked now, a hire when you're ready.

## Questions
### Is a design subscription cheaper than hiring a designer?
Baked is a flat $8,999 a month for Basic, $12,000 for Pro, with no recruiting, benefits or tools to add. Whether that's cheaper depends on what a hire costs where you are, and how much design you need each month.

### Can we work with Baked until we hire?
Yes. There are no contracts, so you can pause or cancel any month, and stop once your hire starts.

### Who will we actually work with?
Senior designers who have worked at Meta, Netflix, HubSpot and Expa, and been founding designers at 25+ startups. Work runs in a private Slack channel with your team.

## Next steps
- Book a 30-min intro call: https://cal.com/baked/30min
- Plans: https://baked.design/#pricing
- Recent work: https://baked.design/work/
- Other comparisons: https://baked.design/compare/