You're asking a few questions here. I can answer from my experience working at a consulting shop that charged a lot of money... > Are they charging more becaus

You're asking a few questions here. I can answer from my experience working at a consulting shop that charged a lot of money... > Are they charging more because of overhead? Partially. There's overhead you wouldn't get with a single developer like office space and administrative overhead. A big overlooked piece of overhead is sales overhead. It's much easier to find 40 hours of consulting work a week than 120 hours of work. If its a premium development shop, the developer salaries are probably higher as well. This all may cut into the margins, but it doesn't really explain why they charge so much. > Why do they charge so much? Because they have clients who are willing to pay that much. Plain and simple. > What does the client get that they wouldn't with a single developer? Some companies are bad at finding and retaining talent. This includes contractors. They also might not know how to manage a project. For a lot of companies, they need something done, but this simply isn't their area of expertise. Some single developers can manage their own projects, but sometimes they need more than just a single developer. The workload may be much higher than what a single person could manage, and hiring 3 individual developers can be much less efficient than hiring a team of 3 developers who already work well together. Perhaps they need a designer as well, or they're looking for a project manager who is really good at communicating business needs with them.