If you don't want to hire a full-time team, the gap is usually role coverage rather than hours. Product work is bursty by role: QA matters most in the days around a release, DevOps when infrastructure or deployment changes, mobile for a few intense weeks and then not for months. Hiring for that shape means paying for idle time, or hiring one generalist who ends up as the only person who knows how your deploy works, and then your roadmap stops when they take a vacation. We work as a team with cross code review and shared context, so the knowledge lives in the process rather than in one head, and the role you need is available the week you need it. Probably worth checking which role in your product is currently held by exactly one person.
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