Hire a React developer?

A freelance React developer in the Netherlands charges roughly 70 to 125 euro per hour excluding VAT, depending on seniority and how much responsibility comes with the work. Since AI arrived that number says a lot less than it used to. In nearly every project that reaches us, a large share of the code was written by a model, so the hours that go into typing have dropped sharply. What is left in those hours is reviewing, structuring and deciding. So compare what it costs to get a working feature safely into production, and how long you can keep maintaining it afterwards.

An hourly rate used to be a reasonable yardstick because the spread in what an hour produced was bounded. An experienced developer wrote more and better code in that hour than a junior, and the gap fitted inside a factor of two or three. With AI in the mix that gap has widened enormously. Two people on the same rate can deliver a working, tested and understandable piece of software in the same hour, or a pile of plausible code that has to be thrown out three months later. The hour has stopped being a comparable unit. In practice, the question of what a developer costs has become the question of who reviews the generated code.

Partly. The building itself really is faster: a screen, a form or an integration stands in a fraction of the time it took four years ago. The work that does not scale along is review, architecture and cleaning up the choices a model made for you under time pressure. That part has become relatively more expensive, because more code passes by every week that someone has to understand. Projects that end up cheaper are the ones where that review work is properly organised. Where it is missing, the project looks cheap on paper and turns expensive in the second year.

Judgment. Someone has to decide where the state of a screen lives, what renders on the server and what in the browser, and what happens on a slow or failed request. Someone has to read generated code and spot that a solution works in the demo and falls over at a hundred concurrent users. And someone has to hold on to the knowledge once the assignment ends, so the next change does not turn into archaeology. Those three things now set almost the entire price of a React project. The hours in which code gets typed have become the cheapest part of it.

Yes, and by now that is a sizeable part of our work. Such a codebase usually looks tidy and works at first glance, because a model writes readable code. The problems sit a layer deeper: the same logic in four places, state leaking across the whole screen, tests that only confirm what the code already does. We start with an audit that names what is there, what can go and what breaks first, and we build after that. You will also hear it from us when carrying on with what you already have is the sensible route.

React sits in almost every frontend we deliver, paired with TypeScript and often Next.js, and the work leaves the door as a whole: design, build, review and maintenance. Our process is built entirely around AI, with a human checking every line before it goes live. We push back when there is a better route, also when that route means less work for us. We are a senior studio at Hofplein in Rotterdam, so you can drop by and watch what is being built at the table.