Proxify Alternative
Proxify staffs individual senior developers you manage. StepTo runs a managed dedicated team in Belgrade (CET) with one delivery owner. An honest, sourced comparison of both models.
Reviewed by Igor Gazivoda, Co-founder & CEO · Updated
A Proxify Alternative for Teams That Want Delivery Owned, Not Just Staffed
The honest difference in one sentence: Proxify sells individual senior developers on a per-developer staffing model that you manage; StepTo sells a managed dedicated development team with a single delivery owner accountable for outcomes. Everything else on this page follows from that one distinction.
Proxify, founded in 2018, is a large and well-run remote talent network. It reports 6,000+ vetted professionals across 90 talent origin countries, holds ISO 27001 certification, carries a 4.4 TrustScore across 312 Trustpilot reviews, and publishes real rates on its own pricing page: €5,100–€8,000 per month for a senior full-time developer, stated as equivalent to €32–€50 per hour. It also offers a first-week-free satisfaction guarantee and assigns every client both a Client Engineer and a Client Manager. Those are substantive strengths, and this page does not pretend otherwise.
StepTo is a different shape of company. Founded in Belgrade in 2014, it is 15–20 engineers in one office, all working CET (UTC+1), boutique by design. Pricing is published per team rather than per seat: dedicated teams from $13,500/month, staff augmentation from $4,500/month, and $25–85/hour by seniority. Engineers average 7+ years of experience and 95% stay.
Both companies publish real pricing, so neither one is “more transparent” than the other — they simply price in different units, because they are selling different things. What follows compares the two models across engagement structure, pricing unit, team composition, timezone, vetting and guarantees, so you can pick the one that matches how you actually want to build.
Proxify vs StepTo: Side-by-Side Comparison
Per-developer staffing and managed dedicated teams, compared on the factors that actually change the buying decision
| Factor | Proxify (per-developer staffing) | StepTo (managed dedicated team) |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement Model | Staff augmentation — you hire individual senior developers who join and are managed inside your own team | Managed dedicated team — a group engaged exclusively for you, with a single delivery owner |
| Who Manages Delivery | Your engineering leads. Proxify handles contracts, payroll, HR and admin; technical direction stays with you | StepTo. One delivery owner is accountable for scope, sequencing and outcomes alongside your product lead |
| Pricing Unit | Per developer, per month. Published on proxify.io/pricing: €5,100–€8,000/month per senior full-time developer, stated as equivalent to €32–€50/hour | Per team, per month. Published on stepto.net/pricing: dedicated team from $13,500/month; staff augmentation from $4,500/month; $25–85/hour by seniority |
| Talent Pool Scale | 6,000+ vetted professionals across 90 talent origin countries — the larger network by a wide margin | 15–20 engineers in one Belgrade office. Boutique by design, not by ambition |
| Team Structure | A distributed remote network. Each hire is matched individually; colleagues may never have worked together before | One co-located team that works together daily and has done so for years — shared standards from day one |
| Timezone | Depends on who you are matched with. The network spans 90 talent origin countries, so overlap is a per-hire outcome | Single CET timezone (UTC+1) for the whole team — predictable daily overlap with the EU, UK and US East Coast |
| Vetting Transparency | Publishes a stage-by-stage funnel: 20,000+ monthly applications down to roughly 1% accepted, with each intermediate conversion rate shown | 3-stage process — domain technical assessment, live coding interview with a senior engineer, English communication review. Fewer than 8% of applicants reach the team |
| Trial / Guarantee | First-week-free satisfaction guarantee — if you are not happy after week one, that week is free of charge | No published free-trial window. Commercial protection is structural: fixed monthly team pricing and terms agreed before kickoff |
| Security Certification | ISO 27001 certified — a formal, audited information-security certification | No published ISO certification. Every engagement starts with an NDA, a data processing agreement and IP assignment terms |
| Best Fit | You have engineering management capacity in-house and want to add senior individuals, flexibly, with compliance handled | You want a small team and one accountable owner for delivery, without adding management load to your side |
Several rows are marked in favour of both providers, and several in favour of Proxify — that is deliberate. Proxify figures (rates, talent pool size, vetting funnel, ISO 27001, Trustpilot score, satisfaction guarantee) are taken from Proxify's own published pages and from Trustpilot as of research in 2026, and may change. Verify current terms directly with the provider before deciding.
What Proxify Does Well
A comparison page that only lists a competitor's weaknesses is not worth reading. These are the areas where Proxify is genuinely strong, and where it may well be the right answer for you.
Published Rates and a Live Calculator
Proxify publishes €5,100–€8,000 per month for a senior full-time developer — stated as equivalent to €32–€50 per hour — behind an interactive calculator on its pricing page, with a stated 4% discount for more developers. That is real published pricing, not a "contact us" gate.
A Genuinely Large Talent Network
Proxify reports 6,000+ vetted professionals spanning 90 talent origin countries and 1,000+ tech competencies. If your requirement is an unusual stack or a niche specialism, breadth like that is a real advantage that a 15–20 person team cannot match.
ISO 27001 Certification
Proxify holds ISO 27001, a formal audited information-security certification, and displays it across its homepage, company, pricing and enterprise pages. If your procurement process requires that certificate specifically, that is a box Proxify ticks and StepTo does not.
Public Third-Party Review Volume
Proxify carries a 4.4 TrustScore across 312 Trustpilot reviews, with review badges surfaced site-wide. A public, sizeable review base is a legitimate trust signal and it is fair to weigh it when comparing vendors.
A Two-Person Client Team
Every Proxify client is assigned both a Client Engineer for technical matching and oversight and a Client Manager for onboarding, HR and admin. Two named points of contact instead of one generic account manager is a thoughtful service design.
Eight Language Locales and Strong Content
The Proxify site runs in eight locales — English plus Swedish, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Norwegian and Finnish — alongside a "Builders" podcast and an actively maintained customer-stories archive. For a Nordic or Benelux buyer who wants to evaluate in their own language, that matters.
Why Companies Look for a Proxify Alternative
These are not flaws in how Proxify runs its business. They are consequences of the staffing model itself — and they only become problems if you were quietly hoping to buy delivery rather than headcount.
You Still Own Engineering Management
Proxify handles contracts, payroll, HR and admin, and it says so plainly. What it does not take over is technical direction. Sprint planning, prioritisation, code review culture and accountability for the outcome remain with your leads — which is fine if you have that capacity, and expensive if you do not.
Individuals Matched, Not a Team Assembled
Each hire is matched separately from a 6,000+ person network. Three excellent senior developers who have never worked together are not the same thing as a team. Turning them into one — shared conventions, review norms, a working rhythm — is work that lands on your side.
Timezone Is a Per-Hire Outcome
With a network spanning 90 talent origin countries, overlap with your working day depends on who you are matched with rather than on a single, stated company timezone. That is workable, but it is a variable you manage per developer instead of a fixed property of the engagement.
Cost Scales Strictly Per Head
A per-developer monthly rate is clean and predictable, but it means every additional capability — a second backend engineer, a QA specialist, a DevOps hand for two days a week — is another full seat on the invoice. Team-level pricing lets a smaller budget cover a wider mix of skills.
Entity Location Is Worth Confirming
Proxify describes itself as headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, while the only physical address published in its site footer is 207 Regent Street, London, with a UK phone number. Nothing improper about that — but if your legal or procurement team cares which entity you contract with and where, confirm it directly before signing.
No Fixed-Team or Project Package
Proxify does not publish dedicated-team or fixed-project pricing; the commercial model is per-developer staffing throughout. If what you actually want to buy is "a team that ships this roadmap," you will be assembling that yourself out of individually priced seats.
Published Pricing, Side by Side
Both companies publish rates openly. Here they are, in the units each one actually uses.
Proxify — 3 senior full-time developers (published rate range)
Calculated directly from Proxify's published €5,100–€8,000 per month per senior full-time (40h/week) developer, multiplied by three. Proxify states a 4% discount for more developers, which is not applied here. Contract, compliance and payroll are included per its pricing page; day-to-day engineering management is not.
Monthly
€15,300–€24,000/month
Annual
€183,600–€288,000/year
StepTo — Managed Dedicated Team
Published starting rate on stepto.net/pricing. A team-level figure that includes delivery management, HR, admin and equipment. Final scope and price depend on team size and seniority mix.
Monthly
From $13,500/month
Annual
From $162,000/year
StepTo — Staff Augmentation (closest like-for-like unit)
If you want to compare per-person against per-person, this is the honest comparison point rather than the team rate. Individual engineer rates run $25–85/hour depending on seniority.
Monthly
From $4,500/month
Annual
From $54,000/year
Why we do not show a “savings” number: Proxify publishes in euros per developer; StepTo publishes in US dollars per team. Converting between them and subtracting would produce a headline figure that neither company published and that moves with the exchange rate. Both sets of numbers are reproduced above exactly as each company states them — do your own arithmetic against your own requirement.
The comparison that does hold: per person against per person. Proxify's €5,100–€8,000 per senior developer per month is the figure to weigh against StepTo's staff augmentation from $4,500 per month, not against the full team rate. Full details are on the StepTo pricing page.
Two Different Units of Purchase
The clearest way to understand the choice is to ask what you are buying a unit of. A staffing network sells you a person, per month. A dedicated-team vendor sells you a team, per month. Everything downstream — cost shape, management load, who is accountable when a sprint slips — is determined by that single decision.
Buying people works well when you already have the machine and you need more hands in it. You have a VP of Engineering, a functioning process, a code review culture, a roadmap someone owns. Adding a strong senior developer to that is straightforwardly additive, and Proxify is built precisely for that transaction: matched candidates in around two days, integration in two weeks or less, contracts and payroll handled, and a first-week-free guarantee if the match is wrong.
Buying a team works better when the machine is what you are missing. If your CTO is also your only architect, or if there is no one whose job it is to sequence work and say no, then adding three excellent individuals does not solve the problem — it adds three more people who need direction. A dedicated team ships with the direction included: one delivery owner who plans, sequences and answers for the outcome, working next to your product lead rather than reporting into your engineering manager.
Scale cuts both ways here too. A network of 6,000+ professionals across 90 talent origin countries can find you a Rust engineer with embedded systems experience in a specific timezone; a 15–20 person Belgrade team cannot. Conversely, that same Belgrade team has worked together for years, sits in one office on one timezone, and does not need to be introduced to itself before it starts. Breadth and cohesion are a genuine trade, and pretending one dominates the other would be dishonest.
So the question is not which company is better. It is which unit you want to buy — and whether the management capacity to run individuals is something you have spare, or something you were hoping to acquire along with the engineers.
Which One Should You Choose?
A short, honest decision rule. If the left column describes you, Proxify is the better buy and we would tell you so on a call.
Choose Proxify if…
- You want to hire individual senior developers into a team you already manage well
- You have engineering leadership capacity in-house and only need more hands
- You need a niche or unusual skill set that a large network is more likely to hold
- ISO 27001 certification is a hard requirement in your procurement process
- A first-week-free satisfaction guarantee materially reduces your risk of trying
- You want to evaluate and contract in Swedish, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Norwegian or Finnish
Choose StepTo if…
- You want a small co-located team with one delivery owner accountable for outcomes
- You do not have spare engineering management capacity and do not want to add load
- A single fixed CET timezone across the whole team matters more than network breadth
- You would rather budget per team than per seat, and mix skills inside one line item
- Continuity matters — 95% retention and 7+ years average experience per engineer
- You are in the EU, UK or US East Coast and want daily real-time overlap, with German-speaking engineers available for DACH
Why StepTo Works as a Proxify Alternative
What a managed dedicated team gives you that a per-developer staffing engagement, by design, does not
One Delivery Owner, Not a Roster
The core difference. With staff augmentation you get people and keep the management. With StepTo you get a team and a named delivery owner who is accountable for what ships — working alongside your product lead, not waiting on your engineering manager.
A Team That Already Works Together
StepTo is 15–20 engineers in one Belgrade office who share conventions, review each other's code and have done so for years. You are not assembling strangers into a unit — you are engaging a unit that already exists.
One Timezone for the Whole Team
Everyone works CET (UTC+1) — the same business day as Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and the Nordics, with solid afternoon overlap into the US East Coast. Several team members are fluent in German, which matters for DACH clients running reviews in their own language.
Team-Level Monthly Pricing
A dedicated team starts at $13,500/month and staff augmentation at $4,500/month, published openly on our pricing page. Because the unit is the team rather than the seat, a mixed skill set — backend, frontend, a slice of DevOps — fits inside one budget line.
95% Retention, 7+ Years Average Experience
Engineers average 7+ years of experience and 95% stay. Continuity is the whole point of a boutique model: the team that learns your architecture in month one is the team that still knows it in year three.
IP and Data Terms Settled Before Kickoff
Every engagement starts with an NDA, a data processing agreement and IP assignment terms. We do not publish an ISO 27001 certificate — if that specific certification is a hard procurement requirement, say so early and weigh it honestly.
How StepTo Vets Engineers
Proxify publishes a stage-by-stage funnel from 20,000+ monthly applications down to roughly 1% accepted — a genuinely granular disclosure. Here is ours, at boutique scale.
Domain Technical Assessment
Every candidate completes a technical assessment specific to their domain — backend, frontend, data, DevOps — covering architecture patterns, practical problem solving and the tooling they would actually use on your stack.
Deliverable: Domain-specific technical scorecard
Live Coding Interview with a Senior Engineer
A senior StepTo engineer runs a live coding session. This is where we see how someone reasons under mild pressure, how they handle being wrong, and whether they can explain a tradeoff rather than just implement one.
Deliverable: Code quality and reasoning assessment
English Communication Review
Written and spoken English are assessed directly. A dedicated team that cannot write a clear pull request description or push back in a design review is not a dedicated team — it is a translation problem you inherit.
Deliverable: Communication rating
Fewer Than 8% Reach the Team
Across those three stages, fewer than 8% of applicants join StepTo. The engineers who do average 7+ years of experience, and 95% of them stay — which is what makes a 15–20 person team viable as a delivery model at all.
Deliverable: 7+ years average experience, 95% retention
What the Team Actually Builds
StepTo delivers custom software development, dedicated development teams, staff augmentation, AI and LLM integration work including retrieval-augmented generation, and DevOps. The stack in daily use covers TypeScript, React, Next.js, Node.js, Python, Java, .NET and Go, running on AWS, Azure and GCP with Docker, Kubernetes and Terraform.
Being physically in Belgrade is part of the product rather than a detail. It puts the whole team on CET, one business day away from most of Europe and with real afternoon overlap into the US East Coast — the practical case for nearshore development over a fully distributed network. If you want the regional detail — talent supply, cost structure, working culture — that is covered on outsourcing to Serbia.
Commercially, every engagement opens with an NDA, a data processing agreement and IP assignment terms, so ownership and data handling are settled in writing before anyone writes code. Rates are published rather than quoted on request: see the pricing page for the full breakdown by engagement type and seniority.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Proxify alternative?
It depends on what you are actually buying. Proxify is a staff-augmentation network: you hire individual senior developers, at €5,100–€8,000 per month each per its published pricing page, and you manage them inside your own team. The best alternative for someone who wants that same model at larger scale is another large network. The best alternative for someone who wants a small, co-located team with a single delivery owner accountable for outcomes is a boutique dedicated-team vendor — which is what StepTo is: 15–20 engineers in Belgrade, working CET, with dedicated teams from $13,500/month. Choose by model first, vendor second.
How is StepTo different from Proxify?
Proxify sells individual senior developers on a per-developer staffing model — you manage them. StepTo sells a managed dedicated team with a single delivery owner — we manage delivery. Two secondary differences follow from that. First, structure: Proxify draws from a distributed network of 6,000+ vetted professionals across 90 talent origin countries, matched individually, while StepTo is one co-located Belgrade team of 15–20 engineers who work together daily. Second, the pricing unit: Proxify publishes a per-developer monthly rate, StepTo publishes a per-team monthly rate. Both companies publish real pricing, so this is a difference in unit, not in transparency.
What does StepTo cost compared to Proxify?
Proxify publishes €5,100–€8,000 per month for a senior full-time (40 hours/week) developer, stated as equivalent to €32–€50 per hour, with a 4% discount for more developers. StepTo publishes dedicated teams from $13,500 per month, staff augmentation from $4,500 per month, and hourly rates of $25–85 depending on seniority. Note that the two are quoted in different currencies and different units — per developer versus per team — and we deliberately do not convert between them here, because exchange rates move and a converted figure would imply a precision neither company published. The right comparison is per-person to per-person: Proxify's per-developer rate against StepTo's staff augmentation rate.
When should I choose Proxify over StepTo?
Choose Proxify when you have engineering management capacity in-house and want to add senior individuals to a team you already run well. It is also the better fit if you need an unusual or niche skill set — a 6,000+ person network across 1,000+ tech competencies covers ground a 15–20 person team cannot; if ISO 27001 certification is a hard procurement requirement; if you want a first-week-free satisfaction guarantee before committing; or if you want to evaluate a vendor in Swedish, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Norwegian or Finnish, all of which Proxify's site supports. Those are genuine strengths and worth weighing properly.
Does StepTo offer a free trial or satisfaction guarantee like Proxify's first week free?
No, and it is worth being direct about that. Proxify publishes a satisfaction guarantee stating that if you are not happy after your first week, that week is free of charge. StepTo does not publish an equivalent free-trial window, so if a no-cost exit in week one is important to you, Proxify has the better answer. StepTo's protection is structural rather than a trial period: fixed monthly team pricing with no hourly surprises, commercial and IP terms agreed before kickoff, and a 95% retention rate that means the people who start on your project are the people who finish it.
Is StepTo's talent pool as large as Proxify's?
Not remotely, and that is the design rather than a shortfall. Proxify reports 6,000+ vetted professionals across 90 talent origin countries. StepTo is 15–20 engineers in a single Belgrade office, founded in 2014. A network optimises for finding the right individual out of thousands; a boutique team optimises for a small group that already works well together and stays. If your requirement is breadth of skills or a rare specialism, the network wins. If your requirement is a cohesive team with continuity and one owner, the boutique wins. Both are legitimate answers to different questions.
How does StepTo handle security, IP and compliance compared to Proxify?
Proxify is ISO 27001 certified — a formal, audited information-security certification displayed across its site — and it markets worker-classification compliance handling for markets including the UK and the Netherlands. StepTo does not publish an ISO 27001 certificate. What StepTo does is start every engagement with an NDA, a data processing agreement and explicit IP assignment terms, so ownership of the code and handling of any personal data are settled in writing before the first commit. If a formal ISO certificate is a gating requirement in your procurement process, Proxify meets it and StepTo does not — raise it in the first call rather than at contract stage.
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