Two quotes arrive for the same website project. The agency’s comes in at € 45.000, with six names on the org chart and neither of the two seniors who ran the pitch appearing in the delivery plan. The freelancer’s comes in at € 18.000, with one name and a start date in March, because that is when their current project ends. Both offers are fair, and both are priced for a shape of work that is not the one in front of you.
The third option is a firm of two or three senior people who do the work themselves and buy in whatever they do not cover. For a website that has to launch, rank, and still be maintained in two years, that shape usually matches the work more closely than either of the other two.
What is a micro agency?
A micro agency is a firm of roughly two to five senior practitioners who do the client work themselves and bring in specialists for the rest. Nobody bills junior work at senior rates, nobody sits between you and the person writing the code, and there is no org chart to fund. The people who pitch the project are the people who build it.
The model came out of arithmetic rather than positioning. A firm of thirty has to keep thirty people busy, which means selling work that fits the people already on the payroll. A firm of two sells the work it wants and rents the rest.
How is a micro agency different from a freelancer or an agency?
The three models differ less in what they can build than in who carries the risk when something goes wrong.
| Traditional agency | Freelancer | Micro agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who does your work | A delivery team you usually meet after signing | The person you spoke to | The two or three people you spoke to |
| What the price covers | The work plus the structure around it: management, sales, utilisation | Their time and nothing else | The work, plus a network paid for out of the fee |
| Parallel workstreams | Several, which is what the headcount is for | One | One, sometimes two |
| If one person is unavailable | Someone else picks it up, with a handover cost | The project stops | Capacity halves and the schedule slips |
| Disciplines in house | Most of them, at varying depth | One, deep | Two or three deep, the rest bought in |
| Who absorbs a bad estimate | The firm, spread across many projects | The individual, which is a thin buffer | The firm, across a handful of projects |
| Fits best | Large programmes with many stakeholders | A defined piece of work inside someone else’s plan | A whole website that has to launch and then keep running |
The freelancer column has one entry worth sitting with. If your freelancer takes a permanent job in March, your project has no owner and no documentation you did not ask for in advance. In an industry with no formal barrier to entry, the work of judging who is competent already falls entirely on you, and it falls on you again the moment you have to replace them.
What kind of project fits the model?
Digital budgets at mid-sized companies typically land between € 10.000 and € 50.000. That band is awkward: too small to be interesting to a full-service firm, too broad for one specialist.
Projects that fit:
- A website rebuild where design, build, content structure and search all have to move together.
- A migration off a system the marketing team has outgrown, where somebody has to own redirects and rankings as well as the new build.
- Ongoing work on a site that is already live, through something like a website subscription, where the value is in the same people knowing the system a year later.
- Technical delivery behind a design studio’s brand, which is what white-label development is for.
Projects that do not fit are just as easy to name. A six-month redesign with four parallel workstreams, dedicated QA and a full-time project manager needs an actual agency. So does a programme where the coordination is the hard part rather than the building. We have written about that boundary in more detail in what to expect when you work with a micro agency.
Where does the micro agency model fall short?
Four places, and they are structural rather than fixable:
- Capacity is a hard ceiling. Two people cannot run four workstreams at once, so if your launch date depends on five things happening in parallel, you are buying an agency whether you like the org chart or not.
- The availability buffer is thin. One person out for two weeks removes half the capacity. The project slows rather than stops, which is better than the freelancer case and nothing like the resilience of a firm of forty.
- A network is not the same as having people in house. Bought-in specialists are good, and they are scheduled around their other clients. When a project needs a discipline nobody in the network covers, somebody has to go and find one, and coordinating that is precisely the overhead the model exists to avoid.
- Procurement sometimes rules it out before anyone reads the proposal. Some companies screen suppliers on headcount, liability cover or a security review that a two-person firm will not clear. Check that inside your own organisation before you get attached to the setup.
That list is what to ask a micro agency about directly, because a provider who cannot name their own limits has not thought about them.
What happens when two people are not enough?
This is my daily business model, and the capacity ceiling is the part of it I have spent the most time on.
First I hired a part-time developer to help me, and I quickly realised that my solo setup was not built for delegating work. Everything that made me fast alone (context in my head, no handover, decisions made while typing) is exactly what makes a second person slow. So I hired agents instead, and now my part-time developer and I work on improving the setup rather than him working on the projects themselves.
That is a smaller and stranger answer than “we hired three people”, and it is what actually happened. I had to bet the agency on AI to stay on top of the game as a solopreneur in times where AI is everywhere. The work moved from doing the projects to building the system that does them.
There are things I will not hand over, and the list has not moved: strategic judgement, and anything where a human can come to harm. We keep a written version of that for client systems in what we do not let an AI agent do in a client’s CMS.
How is the money structured?
Fixed price per project, agreed before work starts. There is no timesheet, no utilisation target, and no hour that has to be filled to cover an office.
That matters more than the headline number. When a provider bills by the hour, getting faster costs them money, which is a bad thing to have sitting inside the relationship (we made the longer argument in AI finally killed hourly billing). Fixed pricing puts the estimate risk on the provider, which is where a firm of two feels it immediately and prices honestly as a result.
The follow-on work usually runs as a subscription rather than a retainer with an hour cap, because a website that is live needs attention on a schedule nobody can predict in advance.
How do you check whether a micro agency is any good?
Most buyers never get to this step. The 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report 2024 reports that 81% of buyers pick a preferred vendor before they ever speak to sales, and that 85% have set their purchase requirements by that point. The decision is largely made in a phase the seller never sees, which means familiarity is doing the work that evaluation should be doing.
That is a problem in this industry specifically, because there is no credential to fall back on. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 found that 82% of developers learned to code through online resources rather than formal education, and only about half learned at school at all. Some of the best people in the field are self-taught. It also means nothing on a website tells you whether you are looking at fifteen years of production experience or a course finished last month.
These five questions do most of the work:
| Ask this | What a good answer sounds like |
|---|---|
| Why did you choose that architecture on your last project? | A tradeoff, and what they rejected |
| Who does the work when both of you are busy? | A named person or a named limit, not “we always find a way” |
| What is in the fixed price and what triggers a change order? | A boundary they can state in one sentence |
| Whose name are the domain, hosting and repository in? | Yours, from day one |
| What have you talked a client out of? | A real example where they cost themselves money |
The last one is the most useful and the hardest to fake. A provider who has never argued a client out of something is either very new or selling whatever was asked for. Our guide to evaluating digital offers goes through the same exercise on the paperwork side.
Is the model going anywhere?
Larger firms keep spinning up lean units, and freelancers keep forming networks that behave like small firms without the shared liability. Both are moving toward the same shape from opposite directions, which suggests the shape is right for the size of work in the middle.
I would say the pressure on it now comes from the other side. A single developer with a good AI setup can produce in a week what took a team of four a month two years ago, so the floor is rising fast. The question that decides a project now is whether anyone is still around in a year when the platform changes its API and something breaks.
If you are weighing a project in that middle band, a Headless Audit is where most clients start. It puts a number and a scope on the work before anyone commits to a model.