Arc and ivector meet the same agency owner at the same moment: there's more signed work than people to do it. But they answer different questions. Arc helps a company hire a remote developer, either as a freelancer with a trial period or as a full-time employee for a placement fee. ivector doesn't place anyone with you. It supplies a named engineer or a two-person pod who delivers under your agency's brand, starting with a paid pilot task. So the first question isn't Arc or ivector, it's whether your overflow is temporary or whether it's really a hire you haven't made yet.
We sell the second option, so read with that in mind. Arc is its owner's trademark and ivector has no affiliation with it. What this post says about Arc comes from Arc's own website as of 24 October 2026, linked where it's used. Fees and terms change, so check the current page before relying on any figure here.
What Arc offers, from its own pages
Arc's pricing page sets out two tracks, as of 24 October 2026. For freelance hires, it describes a risk-free trial period of up to two weeks. For full-time hires, it describes a one-time fee based on the developer's first-year salary, with 20% given as the typical rate. Arc's hiring pages also mention a contract-to-hire fee when a freelance engagement is extended into a full-time hire (Arc: hire freelance ROS developers). In both cases the end state is the same: the developer works for you, as your contractor or your employee.
What ivector offers, from the partners page
ivector is a software firm founded in 2022 in Mountain View, California, and the partners page describes one arrangement for agencies. A named senior engineer or a two-person pod works in your repositories, your cloud and your standups, under your brand, with four hours of overlap with your timezone each working day written into the agreement. Delivery is US-led from California with a global engineering bench, and we name the country in conversation before you sign anything.
It starts with a pilot task from your own backlog, one to two weeks of a senior engineer's work, scoped and priced in writing within 48 hours. If the code isn't the standard you'd ship to your client, you pay the pilot fee and nothing else, and you keep the code and the IP. If it is, we agree a monthly rate for the engineer or pod. We supply the engineer; placing people onto your payroll isn't part of the partners offer.
Side by side
| Arc | ivector | |
|---|---|---|
| What you end up with | A remote developer you engage directly, freelance or full time | An engineer or two-person pod supplied by a firm |
| How it starts | Freelance: a risk-free trial of up to two weeks | A fixed-price pilot task from your backlog, paid either way |
| Path to a permanent hire | Yes: full-time placement, or contract-to-hire | Not part of the partners offer |
| Fees you can see in advance | A placement fee for full-time hires, typically 20% of first-year salary, on Arc's pricing page | No published rate card; an itemised number within 48 hours of scoping |
| Brand, IP and your clients | Agreed between you and the developer you engage | White-label by default, IP assigned to you, non-solicitation of your clients |
| Who you contract with | The developer, as their client or employer | ivector, the firm supplying the engineer |
Temporary overflow or a missing hire?
This is the question that decides it, and it's worth being honest about. If you've had more work than people for six months running, and your pipeline says that won't change, you don't have overflow. You have a hire you haven't made. Arc's full-time track is built for exactly that, and over a long enough period an employee usually costs less than any partner's monthly rate, because you're not paying for a firm's overhead and margin on top. A partner like us is the better answer when the extra work is real but uneven: one client's build, a quarter's spike, an AI feature nobody on the team has shipped before.
The two can also be sequenced: cover the gap with a partner while you run a proper hiring process, because a rushed hire is the most expensive mistake on this list. Our post on what an open senior role costs while you wait puts some numbers on that wait.
Three other differences matter, briefly.
Arc's freelance trial is better on risk. It's described as risk-free. Our pilot is paid either way; what you get for that is a finished task and code you keep, judged against the standard you'd ship.
Engaging a developer directly puts the employment paperwork on you. A full-time hire is your employee, with everything that implies. A freelancer is your contractor, and for a California agency that raises the classification question the 12 business-to-business criteria walk through. If the freelancer is outside the US, the tax forms change too, as the 1099 and W-8BEN post explains. With a firm as your subcontractor, your contract is with the firm, not with the individual.
Agency terms are where we're built differently. Delivering under your brand, assigning IP to you so you can assign it on to your client, and keeping the engineer away from your client's inbox are written into our partner agreement. With a developer you engage directly, those are yours to negotiate.
When Arc is the better choice
- The extra work is permanent, and you want an employee rather than a supplier.
- You want to try a freelancer before paying, and you have a lead with time to manage them.
- You'd like the option of converting a contractor into a hire later, on known terms.
- You need a budget line now: Arc's full-time fee is published, and we quote only after scoping.
A worked example
Picture an 18-person agency (an invented example, not an ivector client) with two problems in one quarter. Its back-end lead is leaving in March, and the role will exist for as long as the agency does. Separately, a retail client has asked for an LLM-powered product search in its app, by May, and nobody on the team has built one.
The back-end role is a hire. Starting the search now, through a platform with a full-time track like Arc's or any other route, is the right call, and covering it with a partner for a year would cost more than the hire.
The search feature is overflow. It has an end, it needs a skill the agency doesn't have yet, and it must go out under the agency's name. That's a pilot: one slice of the feature (say, the retrieval layer and the tests that show it returns the right products) built in the agency's repo, demoed weekly and judged before the client's date depends on it.
Our opinion: an agency that uses a partner to avoid ever hiring is renting its own core team, and one that hires for every spike ends up carrying salaries through the quiet months. Most need both tools, used for different jobs.
The same trial-or-pilot question comes up in our ivector vs Toptal comparison, and staff augmentation vs outsourcing vs white-label covers who carries the risk in each model. If your problem looks like the search feature, see how the pilot runs or tell us the scope.
