A margin model that'stransparentconsultancy-gradeconfigurablehonest about rampyour numbers, not ours
A consultancy-lens comparison between a permanent hire and a CoderCo deployment over the same first year. Same client billing rate either way. Move the sliders to match your commercials and the numbers update live.
Revenue acceleration plus avoided perm burden, per engineer.
Drag the sliders to match your commercials. The margin delta is the recovered revenue from a faster ramp plus the avoided perm-side burden.
- Revenue advantage£46,703
10 extra billable weeks at £900 a day.
- Cost advantage£35,265
Recruiter fee £16,000 plus employer overhead £14,400 plus a salary differential of £4,865.
Full margin breakdown per route
- Revenue
- £66,000
- Cost
- £110,400
- Salary, full year
- £80,000
- Recruiter fee
- £16,000
- Employer overhead (18%)
- £14,400
- Revenue
- £112,703
- Cost
- £75,135
- Day rate × 125 billable days
- £75,135
Effects this model doesn't captureShowHide
- Hiring time. Weeks of senior-engineer interview hours and offer cycles.
- Bad-hire risk. Industry data puts a misfire at 30% to 200% of annual salary.
- Mentoring overhead. Five to ten hours a week of senior time during ramp.
- Redundancy exposure. CoderCo cost stops the moment billing stops.
Permalinkable and shareable, with the iframe embed snippet ready to drop into your internal business case.
What goes into the margin model.
Both routes run on the same engagement at the same client billing rate and the same utilisation, since the engineer is doing identical work on the client's behalf. The model then isolates the two effects that genuinely differ between a perm hire and a CoderCo deployment: the speed at which billable revenue actually starts flowing alongside the shape of the cost base sitting under that revenue.
On the perm side, the cost is a full year of salary plus employer overhead at 18% plus the recruiter fee, regardless of how the engagement plays out. Revenue starts only once the new hire has ramped, which on a typical cloud stack lands between three and six months. On the CoderCo side, the cost is the day rate billed only for the days the engineer is actually working on your engagement. The ramp lands in weeks rather than months because the engineer arrives pre-loaded on the discipline.
Numbers are deliberately conservative. The model excludes redundancy exposure on the perm side if the engagement ends early, alongside the uplift from a CoderCo engineer rolling onto a second engagement inside the year. Both omitted effects widen the delta further on a real P&L. The "what this model doesn't capture" panel below the calculator covers the softer effects (hiring time and risk, mentoring overhead) that finance teams typically allocate separately.
Client billing rate
What you charge your end client per day for the engineer. Set this to your real rack rate. Both routes share the same number, so the difference between perm and CoderCo shows up purely in the cost shape and in the ramp gap, never as inflated revenue.
Utilisation
Share of working days the engineer is actually billable, after accounting for bench between contracts, internal work, holiday and gaps in client demand. Mid-market consultancies tend to land between 70 and 85 percent on senior cloud talent that's in active demand.
Engagement length
How long the same engagement runs for. Both routes use this window for revenue. The perm cost stays at full-year regardless, which is why short engagements are where the variable cost shape on the CoderCo side starts to compound the win.
Perm ramp
Months the perm hire spends getting up to speed before they bill anything against the client. Three to four months on a familiar stack is typical for senior cloud engineers. Stacks the engineer hasn't worked in before push it closer to six.
CoderCo ramp
Weeks the CoderCo engineer needs before they are billing. The training pipeline already covered the discipline at depth, so the ramp is short-stack and short-context familiarisation. Two weeks is a fair default on most clients we have worked with.
Recruiter fee and employer overhead
Recruiter fee at 15 to 25 percent of base salary is standard for senior cloud roles in the UK. Employer overhead at 18 percent covers NI alongside pension contribution, equipment, software seats and benefits variance. The CoderCo side carries none of these.
Drop it into your internal business case.
The calculator is iframe-embeddable. Paste the snippet on the right into a Notion, Confluence or internal wiki page and your finance partner gets the same live tool with no login required.
<iframe src="https://partners.coderco.io/embed/cost-calculator" width="100%" height="780" loading="lazy" style="border:0;background:#0A0E1A;" title="CoderCo cost comparison" ></iframe>
Want a tailored proposal instead?
The calculator is the starting point. Send us the role and your constraints and we will come back with a shortlist and commercials ASAP.