Large tech consultancies like Thoughtworks and codecentric have built strong reputations. They publish thought leadership, train talented engineers, and handle complex transformation programs. For certain problems, they are the right call.
Building and scaling a software product is not one of those problems.
Companies that assign their product team to a large consultancy often discover the same frictions: costs that compound with every delay, consultants shared across client accounts leading to low ownership, IP entanglements in proprietary frameworks, and a handover that leaves the internal team holding code they did not build. GoTeams was designed around the opposite model. Here are the five structural differences.
1. How You Get Billed
Thoughtworks charges between €200 and €400 per hour for consulting engagements, with custom builds typically ranging between a frontend prototype in some weeks, to overly complex projects taking up to 18 months with extensions being a common practice. Hourly billing creates a structural incentive for engagement length: every additional sprint, every discovery phase, and every stakeholder alignment round adds to the invoice. Popular German IT consultancies operate on similar daily-rate models, typically contracted as time-and-materials.
GoTeams uses all-in monthly pricing. The PoC tier starts at €4,900 per month. The Scale tier, which covers a full senior product and engineering team, starts at €49,000 per month. Every tier includes delivery management, QA, and access to the GoTeams system. No hourly runouts, no billing that rewards slowness. This creates consistency and predictability for the books.
2. Who Actually Works on Your Product
Large consultancies present their best people in the sales process. The senior partner who ran the pitch, the principal engineer who designed the architecture, the delivery lead who set the timeline: these close the engagement. Post-signature, a different reality often emerges. Junior consultants carry the delivery. Seniors remain nominally on the account but spread their attention across three or four engagements simultaneously. The economics of a large consultancy depend on a leverage ratio between senior and junior time.
GoTeams assembles every team exclusively for one product. GoTeams members are fully employed (not freelance, not contractor) and dedicated entirely to the partner’s mission. They attend your standups, work in your Slack, and carry your roadmap the same way an in-house engineer does. The 98% retention rate across all GoTeams engagements follows directly from this structure: team members genuinely embedded in one product and one culture stay.
3. How Long It Takes to Get Started
Engaging a large consultancy requires time before the first line of code is written. A typical sequence: discovery meeting, commercial proposal, legal review, statement of work, staffing, onboarding. From first conversation to a team running production sprints, two to four months is realistic.
GoTeams activates a fully functional team within 30 days of contract signature. The 4,000+ pre-vetted professionals in the hiring database mean assembly does not start from scratch. For a founder raising capital, a corporate building against a board deadline, or a scale-up racing a competitor, this gap is the difference between shipping and stalling.
4. Who Owns What Gets Built
IP ownership in large consultancy contracts is often murkier than it appears. Most contracts assign finished deliverables to the client. The question is what qualifies. Consultancies deploy proprietary frameworks, internal toolkits, and pre-built components that remain their intellectual property. The code on top belongs to the client; the scaffolding it runs on belongs to the consultancy. If the client later wants to switch partners or build in-house, they discover the dependency.
GoTeams transfers 100% of IP, code, and infrastructure to the partner. No proprietary frameworks with ownership carve-outs. GoTeams partners have raised €400m+ using GoTeams-built products, in part because the IP chain is clean and investors can verify it.
5. What Happens When the Engagement Ends
The endpoint of a consultancy engagement is a handover. The consultants exit. The internal team takes over a product they did not build, from a codebase they learned in a few weeks, shaped by architectural decisions made before they joined.
GoTeams engagements do not end with a handover. The model is long-term product partnership. Helloparts for example grew from a three-person GoTeams setup to a 34-person team over four years. Consultancies deliver engagements. GoTeams builds business alongside the companies that own it.
6. When a Consultancy Is the Right Choice
Operating model redesign, M&A integration, post-acquisition technical audits that require regulatory cover: these are situations where a large consultancy’s seniority and methodology justify the premium. Building and iterating on a software product, month after month, is not that category. Consultancies are optimised for projects with defined endpoints. Building a new business does not have defined endpoints.
If the goal is a strategy sprint or a technology audit, big IT consultancies are worth their rate. If the goal is to build a lasting product, validate it with real users, ship, and scale, GoTeams delivers that at a fraction of the cost, with a team that stays and IP that belongs entirely to the company that built it.
Frequently Asked Questions
IT consultancies charge €200-€400 per hour, with custom builds typically running 6 to 18 months. A five-person engagement over nine months can exceed €1m+ before extensions. GoTeams’ Scale tier starts at €49,000 per month, all-in, including delivery management and QA. For ongoing product development, GoTeams is substantially more cost-predictable and typically lower in total cost of ownership.
Both. The key difference for product companies is billing model and team dedication. Consultancy delivery teams share time across client accounts on time-and-materials terms. GoTeams teams are exclusively dedicated to one product at an all-in monthly rate, reducing both cost and coordination overhead for continuous delivery cycles.
All IP, code, and infrastructure is fully transferred to the partner from day one. There are no proprietary frameworks with ownership carve-outs. GoTeams partners have raised €400m+ using GoTeams-built products, in part because the IP chain is clean and due diligence is straightforward.
GoTeams activates a fully functional team within 30 days. Large consultancies typically need two to four months from first conversation to production-ready sprints. The 4,000+ pre-vetted professionals in the GoTeams hiring database remove the recruiting phase that drives most of the delay.
The Bottom Line
If you need strategic advice, operating model redesign, or a regulated transformation program, a large consultancy earns its place. But if you are building a software product and need a senior, dedicated team running production sprints within 30 days at a predictable monthly cost, the consultancy model introduces friction that compounds with every sprint.
GoTeams replaces that friction with dedicated long-term engineering that functions like an in-house team, scales on demand, and delivers 0 missed deadlines across all engagements. The companies that get this right use GoTeams to build the product, and call on strategic consultancies only when the problem genuinely requires it.
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