Hire a Django developer?

A senior Django developer in the Netherlands charges roughly 70 to 125 euro per hour excluding VAT, but with Django the rate says less about the bill than the framework does. The first phase is often cheaper than with a framework you have to assemble yourself: the admin, the login system and the permissions are already there, so no weeks disappear into building them. It gets more expensive wherever you step off the paved path, for instance a data model the standard admin cannot represent, or integrations with systems that do not follow their own documentation. For a clearly bounded piece of work we prefer to agree a fixed price, so you know in advance what you are in for.

Django is strong the moment you need a database, users with different permissions and an admin environment: that stands up in a day instead of a month. It also pays off when several people will work on it for years, because the framework imposes a structure everyone follows. It makes less sense for an application that is mostly real-time, such as a chat or a dashboard that refreshes continuously, where Node.js or FastAPI fits better. And for a frontend-heavy app where Django would only serve an API, it is often more framework than you need. We say so when we think a different choice is the wiser one.

Not quite, and the difference costs you time if you get it wrong. Django runs on Python, so every Django developer is also a Python developer, but not the other way around: someone who builds data processing or models in Python has often never worked closely with an ORM, a migration or Django's permission system. If you are looking for someone to build a web application, ask about Django experience specifically, and about what they did the time a migration went wrong in production. If you are looking for someone for data or AI work, Python experience is the criterion and Django is beside the point. We have both in house and will tell you up front which of the two you actually need.

Regularly, and with Django the first question is always the same: which version is this running on. Django drops security support for older releases, so a project stuck on one no longer receives patches, and the upgrade is usually the first job rather than the nice-to-have it looks like on the invoice. What decides how heavy that upgrade gets is the migration history: hand-patched migrations and a database that has quietly drifted from the models turn a day into a fortnight. We read that history before we quote anything, so the number you hear is based on what is actually there.

We reach for Django when a project needs a solid backend and a short path to launch, usually with a React frontend in front of it. Our process runs entirely on AI, with a human checking every line before it goes live, and with Django that check earns its keep: a model happily writes a migration that works locally and drops a column in production. You work directly with the developer who writes the code, with no account manager in between. We are a senior studio at Hofplein in Rotterdam, so you can drop by and watch what is being built at the table.