My experience as an in-house dev working together with freelancers and body shops (in Europe) is less positive. A pattern I commonly see is that they are heavi

My experience as an in-house dev working together with freelancers and body shops (in Europe) is less positive. A pattern I commonly see is that they are heavily technology focused and don't really care about the domain, because domain-specific skills are not transferable. They are snake-oil salesmen, every problem can be solved by adopting some hot new piece of technology which can be added to their CV and increase their market value. What's frustrating is that their contribution is in the end often negative rather than merely zero - adopting over-architected solutions looking good on CV will result in great costs. If you have a strong technical leadership, you can catch their bullshit, but in the op's situation, they would be pretty much relying on freelancers' good will and abilities without much of a chance to verify their claims. To be fair, I've met also a number of very good freelancers, usually staying with the company for years. This same danger exists also with the normal employees, but I think this "pad the CV, move on" is more common in freelancers since they generally operate on shorter timescales.