[HereBeBeasties]

Employer tax contributions

Office space

Hardware and software, SaaS licensing, cloud costs, etc.

Hiring costs (recruitment, recruiters, time lost in selection and hiring)

Secondary cost to rest of the business to change processes, retrain, integrate, help the dev team understand requirements, effectively build and iterate, etc.

Quite possibly a bunch of compliance, security, audit, pen testing, and other regulatory costs depending on the demands their clients have, etc.

Running a team != hiring a bunch of freelancers as a one-off.

[davedx]

Do you know what a freelancer is?

You don’t make tax contributions for them. They bring their own hardware and usually software unless otherwise agreed.

The rest of the stuff is just a laundry list you made up to try and blow costs way past what they actually could be if you’re prudent. Come on

[nobunaga]

Stop giving the guy horrible advice. IF you think throwing some freelance devs with no business support/product/UX support is going to help him, you are so mistaken. Trying to rebuild an existing complex software system that handles hundreds of millions in revenue is not going to be an easy task. You are going to put the man into a corner and ruin him. Jesus.