CAD: Outsource or Hire? An Honest Take From the Other Side

Fair warning: I run a CAD outsourcing studio. So you'd expect me to tell you that outsourcing is always the answer. It isn't. Here's the version I'd give a friend who runs a small architecture practice and asked over coffee.

The numbers, roughly

In Europe, a full-time CAD technician costs you somewhere between €35,000 and €55,000 a year, plus the bits people forget about, software licences (AutoCAD and Revit together run €3,000 to €8,000 per seat annually), training, hardware refreshes, and the slice of overhead they consume.

Outsourced, you're paying per project. A standard architectural drawing set might land between €500 and €5,000 depending on complexity. No idle time, no recruitment, no retention worries.

The maths is simple: if you don't have enough drawing work to keep someone busy 75% of the time, you're probably paying more for in-house than you realise. If you do have that work, in-house wins on the long run.

The quality conversation

The real objection to outsourcing isn't cost. It's will they draw to my standards? Fair question. Most studios have their own layer conventions, their own block libraries, their own way of doing section markers. When you hand work over, that all has to travel with the brief.

What actually makes outsourcing work, from my side of the desk:

Speed (the one people get wrong)

Counterintuitive but true: outsourcing is often faster than your in-house person. Not because we're more talented, because we have buffer capacity. Your CAD tech is juggling three projects. We can drop a second technician on yours when it's urgent.

Our normal turnaround sits around 5-7 working days for a standard architectural set, 2-3 if it's genuinely urgent. Your mileage will vary by supplier.

When to keep it in-house

Hire if you have steady, full-time drawing work, if your projects need somebody sitting next to the designer for real-time iteration, or if the work is sensitive enough that you don't want it leaving the building. Also hire if you genuinely value the cultural side of an integrated team, there's a real argument there that I won't dismiss.

When to outsource

Outsource if your workload swings, if you need a specialist skill (complex 3D, advanced BIM) that you can't justify hiring full-time, if you're growing faster than you can recruit, or if you'd rather your senior people spend their time designing than drafting.

What most of our happiest clients actually do

They hybrid it. They keep one or two in-house people for institutional memory and client-facing work, and they push overflow and specialist work to us. Best of both worlds, no purity test required.