What you actually need might be smaller, cheaper and faster to hire.
Nobody wakes up wanting a development company. You want a specific outcome: a new Umbraco site that works, an upgrade off a dying version, an integration that stops falling over, or someone reliable to keep the whole thing patched. "Umbraco development company" is just the phrase we have all learnt to type when we want those things done by someone competent.
So before you compare companies, be precise about the job. Most Umbraco work falls into four buckets: building something new, upgrading or migrating something old, fixing something broken, and looking after something ongoing. The right supplier depends on which bucket you are in and how big the job is, not on whether the word "company" appears in their branding.
I am Simon Steed, a freelance Umbraco developer. I have been building on Umbraco since 2011, have personally worked on more than 200 Umbraco sites from version 4 through to version 17, and Umbraco named me an MVP in 2026. In practice, a senior freelancer covers the large majority of what people hire an Umbraco development company for:
My rate is £500 a day, tracked in Toggl with the log shared, and the contract, which covers confidentiality, is signed through Onboardo before work starts. You can see the full numbers on my pricing page and the background on my about page. The structural advantage is simple: the person who scopes the work writes the code, so nothing is lost between a salesperson, a project manager and a delivery team.
Honesty first: sometimes a single freelancer is the wrong shape for the job. You genuinely need an agency when several workstreams must run at once (design, build and content migration on a hard deadline), when you need guaranteed cover that does not depend on one person's calendar, when procurement rules require a company of a certain size, or when the project is really a software programme rather than a website. If that is you, hire a team, and do not let anyone talk you out of it.
What you should not do is pay agency overhead for a job one senior developer can carry. A large share of what gets bought as "agency work" is a freelancer-sized job with account management wrapped around it.
This is where I differ from most freelancers. If your project turns out to need a team, I do not just wave you off and wish you luck. My Isle of Man company, Simplepage Ltd, holds the Umbraco Silver Partnership directly, one of fewer than 150 companies worldwide that do, and Simon Antony is one of its brands: a three-person senior team that has been delivering Umbraco since 2008, with Simplepage also taking on bigger software projects beyond a website. Either way you end up with the right-sized supplier, and the same person stays accountable for the recommendation.
So tell me what you are trying to get done. I will tell you honestly whether it is a freelancer job, an agency job, or not worth doing at all, usually in my first reply.
Tell me what you're working on and I'll come back within one working day.
A specialist Umbraco developer offering freelance / contract services to a wide variety of clients across the UK
Maesgwyn, 3 Claremont rd,
Llandudno, North Wales, LL30 2UF