When companies need a new website, the instinct is often to go with the biggest agency they can afford. More people means more expertise, right? In our experience — and in the experience of many clients who’ve come to us after working with large agencies — the opposite is usually true.
The large agency model
Most large agencies (20+ people) operate on a model that creates structural problems for web projects:
You talk to account managers, not builders. The person who sells you the project is not the person who builds it. Your vision passes through multiple layers of interpretation before it reaches the designer or developer. Details get lost. Nuance disappears.
Junior developers do the actual work. Large agencies maintain their margins by staffing projects with junior team members, supervised loosely by senior leads who are spread across multiple projects. The senior talent that impressed you in the pitch rarely touches your code.
Process overhead. Large agencies have project managers, QA teams, design committees, and approval workflows. These exist to manage the complexity of a large organisation — not to benefit your project. A task that takes one person an hour takes an agency a week when you factor in meetings, handoffs, and approvals.
Standardised solutions. To maintain efficiency across many projects, large agencies develop internal templates, component libraries, and standard approaches. Your “custom” website may share more DNA with their last ten projects than you’d expect.
What small agencies do differently
Direct access to senior talent
In a small agency, the person you talk to is the person who builds your site. There’s no game of telephone. Your feedback goes directly to the person making decisions about design, code, and architecture.
This means faster iterations, fewer misunderstandings, and a final product that more closely matches your vision.
Genuine ownership
When a small team builds your project, they own it personally. Their name is on it. Their reputation depends on it. This creates a level of care and attention that’s difficult to achieve in a large organisation where your project is one of dozens.
Flexibility and speed
Need to change direction mid-project? A small agency can adapt in a day. A large agency needs to update the project plan, get approval from the project manager, reschedule resources, and notify the client success team. By the time they’ve processed the change, a small agency has already implemented it.
Lower overhead, better value
A large agency’s rates include the cost of their office space, their management layer, their sales team, and their admin staff. A small agency’s rates are almost entirely the cost of the people doing the work. You get more development and design hours for the same budget.
Technology choices driven by the project
Large agencies standardise on specific technologies because it’s operationally efficient — they can move developers between projects easily. A small agency can choose the best technology for your specific project because they don’t have institutional inertia pushing them toward a default stack.
The concerns about small agencies
There are legitimate questions to ask:
“What if they disappear?” This is the most common concern. The answer: insist on owning your code and having deployment documentation. Any good agency — large or small — should give you full ownership of everything they build. If they won’t, that’s a red flag regardless of their size.
“Can they handle my scale?” For most web projects, yes. A two-person agency can build and maintain a site that serves millions of visitors. The bottleneck in web development is rarely the number of developers — it’s the quality of decisions made by each one.
“What about ongoing support?” Small agencies are often more responsive on support because they have fewer clients and shorter communication chains. Establish a support agreement upfront with clear response times and rates.
“Do they have enough breadth of expertise?” This is where you need to be honest about your needs. If your project requires a dedicated UX researcher, a motion designer, a backend developer, and a DevOps engineer all working simultaneously, a two-person agency isn’t the right fit. But most web projects don’t need that. They need one or two skilled people who can handle design and development end to end.
How to evaluate a small agency
The evaluation criteria are the same as for any agency, but a few things matter more:
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Look at their actual work. Visit live sites they’ve built. Check the performance scores. View them on mobile. Click around. The quality of their portfolio is the single best predictor of the quality you’ll receive.
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Talk to the people who’ll do the work. In a small agency, this should be easy. If they’re articulate about their process, thoughtful about trade-offs, and honest about limitations, you’re in good hands.
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Check their technology depth. A small agency that’s deeply skilled in one stack will outperform a large agency that’s broadly familiar with many. Depth beats breadth.
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Ask about their worst project. How they talk about failures tells you more than how they talk about successes.
Our perspective
Linjerum is a small agency by design, not by accident. We believe the best web work comes from senior people working directly with clients, using tools they’ve mastered, on projects they genuinely care about.
We don’t have account managers or project coordinators. When you work with us, you work with the people writing the code and making the design decisions. That directness produces better results, faster, at a lower cost.
Not every project is right for a small agency. But if yours is, the difference in quality and experience can be significant.
Curious whether we’re a good fit? Tell us about your project at support@linjerum.com.