Two suppliers quote you engineers in Bucharest, Cluj or Timișoara at similar rates. One is staff augmentation, one is a dedicated nearshore team. Buyers treat this as a pricing question. It is a risk-allocation question, and the price follows from the answer.
The actual difference
Staff augmentation: you rent individuals. They join your standups, your board, your review process. Your tech lead decides what gets built and whether it is done. The supplier's obligation ends at supplying a competent person.
Dedicated nearshore team: you buy an outcome from a unit that manages itself. Their lead runs the technical decisions inside a scope you set, and the supplier is accountable for shipping — including for the engineer who leaves.
Everything else people list as a difference (contracts, notice periods, invoicing) follows from that one line.
Cost, honestly counted
| Staff augmentation | Dedicated nearshore team | |
|---|---|---|
| Rate per person | Lower | Higher |
| Management effort on your side | High — you run them | Low — a weekly priority conversation |
| Delivery risk | Yours | Shared, contractually the supplier's |
| Ramp-up cost | Yours, repeated per person | Absorbed by the supplier |
| Cost per delivered feature | Higher unless you manage well | Lower when scope is clear |
The trap is comparing day rates. A €320 augmented engineer who consumes fifteen hours a week of your senior lead's time costs more than a €450 engineer inside a team that reviews itself. Count the internal hours before you compare.
Pick augmentation when
- You have a strong in-house tech lead or CTO with capacity to manage people, not just review PRs.
- The gap is a specific skill for a bounded period — a mobile engineer for one quarter, a data engineer for a migration.
- The architecture is settled and the work is well-specified.
- You need to scale a team you already run, not start one.
Pick a dedicated team when
- Nobody internally has time to manage engineers day to day.
- The outcome matters more than the seat count, and you are willing to state the outcome.
- The work spans design, backend, frontend and deployment — a single augmented developer cannot cover that, and coordinating four of them is a job.
- You want one number per month rather than a timesheet to audit.
The hybrid that works
Start with a bounded, fixed-price first slice — one real deployable thing, written scope, a date. It proves the supplier can ship before you commit to a monthly team, and it costs less than a bad quarter. If it goes well, roll the same people into a dedicated team. If it does not, you have a working artefact and a cheap lesson. Our numbers for both shapes are on the pricing page.
Questions that separate the two suppliers
Ask both: who decides a task is done? Who pays when an engineer leaves in month four? Who owns the architectural decisions? Who is on the call when production breaks at 18:00? An augmentation vendor will answer "you" to all four, honestly. If one answers "us" to all four while quoting an augmentation rate, they are mispricing the risk and it will surface later.
The longer evaluation is in the 42-point checklist; the supplier landscape is ranked in best nearshore development centres in Romania; and how we run a retained team is on the nearshore lean page.
Frequently asked
What is the difference between staff augmentation and a dedicated team?
Staff augmentation rents you individuals who work inside your process and under your management; a dedicated team is a supplier-managed unit that owns delivery of an outcome. The difference is where delivery risk sits, not where the people sit.
Which is cheaper?
Staff augmentation is cheaper per hour and often more expensive per delivered feature, because you absorb the management, review and coordination cost yourself. It only wins when you already have strong in-house engineering leadership.
Can you start with one and move to the other?
Yes, and moving from a bounded slice into a dedicated team is the common path. Moving from augmentation to a dedicated team mid-project is harder, because ownership of the architecture has to change hands.