Team Size Estimator
See the team composition we'd actually staff for your project type, complexity, and timeline, before a vendor proposes one to you.
The recommendations below use the same staffing baselines our delivery team plans real engagements with. Your selections stay in your browser; nothing is stored or sent.
- Full-stack Engineer×2
- QA Engineer×1
- Project Manager×1
How the team is composed, and what it assumes
A staffing estimate is only useful if you can see the reasoning behind each role. Here is how the recommendation is built, and the questions it deliberately leaves for a real scoping conversation.
Where the baseline teams come from
Each project type starts from the crew we'd actually staff for it: a full-stack engineer and a product designer for an MVP, through to a six-person squad with dedicated DevOps, QA, and a project manager for an enterprise platform. These baselines reflect how our real engagements are staffed, not a theoretical org chart, which is why QA and project management appear even at sizes where many proposals quietly drop them.
Why complexity adds a lead, not just bodies
When a build is complex or enterprise-grade, the estimator adds a senior lead engineer rather than more mid-level capacity. That mirrors what actually goes wrong on hard projects: they rarely fail for lack of hands, they fail because architecture decisions had no clear owner. One senior person accountable for the technical direction is worth more than two extra pairs of hands without one.
What an accelerated timeline really costs
Choosing an accelerated timeline adds an engineer instead of pretending the same team can simply move faster. Compressing a schedule raises cost nonlinearly, because a larger parallel team spends more of its week on coordination. The estimator makes that trade visible: speed is bought with headcount and overhead, never discounted out of the plan.
What the estimator can't see
It doesn't know your existing team's skills, whether roles can be part-time or shared, or whether your project needs a specialist such as a data engineer, a mobile-native developer, or a compliance-literate architect. Use the output to sanity-check vendor proposals: a team much leaner than this estimate is probably underscoping QA or project management, and a much larger one deserves a role-by-role justification in writing.
Pair the team shape with a budget range from the software development cost calculator, then send us both. We’ll tell you honestly whether the staffing holds up against your actual scope, including where we’d staff it differently.