We explain how and where to find a good contractor

The second negotiation option is the most transparent for both parties. The customer has a number of SPECIFIC tasks that need to be completed and an approximated lead time. The contractor has an estimate of the hours to complete and the hourly rate or fixed price for which he undertakes to perform the work.

If you work with freelance developers or programmers who are hired through mapping services or job search boards, you are the one in control of the engagement rate. Here, you can either rely on a work ethic and expert experience or keep them under strict control (however, most freelancers are not fans of the latter).

Discuss these or other specific questions with a potential contractor as they can help you think through every detail of the project.

Particularly, freelancers don't have the academic backgrounds, but instead, allow for an extensive portfolio of projects to prove their skills. Don't dwell too much on one portfolio or a story of how long he is with Unity.

Pricing for freelancers is a list of a number of parameters:

- Supply and demand. How much the technology is in demand, the developer is experienced, and how busy he is;
- Marketing - how convincing is the developer with a good portfolio of projects and games. Will be a plus, written blogs, and tutorials, or 1000+ forum posts that are generally helpful, etc.
- What is the state of the market? The global pandemic has given a great boost to an already growing gaming industry. The number of online users, services, games, and applications, as well as attracted investments, is increasing. Therefore, the demand for specialists is high.

A good developer, without location-based, on Upwork, will cost you from $ 26 to $ 75/h. In the US, by comparison, a freelancer in the Unity Developer category has an hourly rate of $ 67. So, when extrapolated to an 8-hour workday, the daily rate is around $ 536 (Freelance Salary Price Index - as of February 2021).

Of course, the price is not objective and depends on the scope of work. If it takes several hours, it is cheaper than contacting a local company or wasting your time on Upwork research or researching other platforms, etc.
However, in a situation where you are a startup or already a long-term project, the work of a freelance Unity developer in the USA can easily cost more than that in some outsourcing company from Europe. Fortunately, there are many outsourcing companies from Central and Eastern Europe where hiring can be 30-50% cheaper, with no loss in quality.

If you need to scale your team by Unity developers to learn AR and VR, you're in luck. There are over 9,000+ Unity development companies registered in Unity forums, and there are probably hundreds of them. As with hiring your own Unity developers, finding the right partner for your organization and training initiatives is key.

Earlier we mentioned, there are those who build more architecture and logic or those who focused on design and artistic parts. Both are very necessary and work great in pairs. Unity Technologies made their one-stop SDK solution and focused on general requirements for wide product interoperability across devices. However, there are still some differences for each type of device, and this is where a creative approach is needed in solving the same problem.

The ideal architecture allows any other Unity specialist to continue the work started by quickly understanding the code. An important note that everyone strives for this, but only in rare cases does this happen.
It is visually impossible to determine how extensible an application is from a specialist until there is an assessment of its architecture.

You need to understand the basic principles. Whichever Senior Specialist takes up the job, if you set deadlines less than he needs, the result will be negative in 80% of cases. It is not for nothing that he takes a high cost per hour of his work, experience and planning to do his job well, but it is unrealistic to jump beyond his capabilities. It is impossible to write high-quality functionality in two days instead of a week. Accordingly, if you suddenly terminate the relationship, another specialist is unlikely to be able to figure out what the first employee did.

Based on our personal cases, only 10-15% of the entire code sent to the team for evaluation can be started or continued to work in it. But, there are also positive cases when initially the work was done by a freelancer first-class and we want to work with him and have a lot to learn. But, more often than not, things go to rework from scratch.

An experienced and competent team, depending on the complexity of the project, always lays a so-called "buffer" in terms of time and assessment, so that the client gets the job of high quality and at the same time does not incur losses in the work.

With freelancers or inexperienced teams, work on a project can go in a completely different scenario. If the client does not like some element or he finds a bug, the developer can easily ask for additional payment for fixing or reworking the functionality. Each case is, of course, individual, but we have repeatedly come across stories from clients about a bad experience of cooperation and a conflict, where the developer asked for additional payment for the work, and the client, being dissatisfied with his work, refused to pay. The result is negative for both!

You can minimize the time spent working on improvements or fixing bugs if you describe your vision of the final product in as much detail as possible and allow the contractor time to plan before starting coding. It's perfectly fine for a team to count 100 hours to complete and they need 10-15 hours to plan. This means that a correct estimate of 10-15% of the total time before creating the architecture will avoid further risks and unforeseen overpayments 2-3 times of the original cost. It will also provide for many possible bugs.

It is worth clarifying that the presence of a QA specialist will also speed up the work at the final stage. Based on our experience, a customer, developer or project manager cannot complete the necessary test cases at the same level and as quickly as a tester. And an attempt to save money on its services can be significantly delayed in the development time itself.

An experienced company representative will most often be able to announce the approximate amounts even before the assessment. But we would not recommend focusing on them until the final sentence and complete proofreading of the outline. Read everything that is written and make sure if the nuances with bug fixing, planning, responsibility, etc. are included. Check with the speed of communication. Modern companies value time and try to work so that the team always has a paid job. Nobody is interested in sitting without work waiting for feedback and edits from you for several days. Therefore, it is better to react to messages as quickly as possible and do not delay the answer. There are situations when a client bears an overpayment for idle hours based on feedback.

Beyond the gaming industry, more and more sectors and industries are seeing the opportunity to use Unity as a universal engine. This provides developers with tremendous potential as their experience and skills become more and more in demand in the market.

You can find relevant professionals both in freelancing and outsourcing companies. But before you start your search, clearly describe the expected result and how realistic the freelancer will do? The most common technical mistake in nearly 90% of startups, facilitators, or small marketing providers is trying to save money on the performer. You will always find those who will do your task cheaper. But practice leads to the fact that the product either works incorrectly, or is not released, or the development cost increases due to rewriting the code for other developers. Everyone makes mistakes, but we really hope that our experience and recommendations in this material will help you successfully implement your ideas and save you from losses.