The question sounds simple: “Should we hire a CAD designer or outsource?” But the real answer requires running the numbers honestly — including the costs that don’t appear on a salary slip. Here’s a frank breakdown.
The case for in-house
Full control. Your designer knows your lab’s conventions, your clients’ preferences, your milling equipment’s tolerances. Long-term, a skilled in-house CAD technician is a genuine asset — especially for complex or client-facing cases where familiarity with the whole workflow matters.
If your volume is high enough and consistent enough to keep a designer productively occupied year-round, in-house can work well. The question is whether that’s actually the case.
The real cost of an in-house dental CAD designer
Let’s run the full calculation for Western Europe:
- Salary (junior to mid-level): €28,000–40,000/year
- exocad licence: €3,000–5,000/year
- Hardware (workstation + monitor, 5-year amortisation): €600–900/year
- Employer social contributions (varies by country): €4,000–9,000/year
- Management and onboarding overhead: 2–4 hours/week of your time
Total annual cost: approximately €36,000–55,000 before sick cover and holiday cover.
The utilisation problem. A full-time hire is paid 250 days per year, including 30 days of leave and statistically 8–10 sick days. At 60–70% productive utilisation — a realistic figure, not a pessimistic one — your effective per-unit cost is nearly double the headline calculation.
What that works out to per unit
At full utilisation, a designer producing 5–8 crown-and-bridge designs per day runs 1,250–2,000 units per year:
- Full utilisation effective cost: €18–44 per unit
- At 65% utilisation: €28–68 per unit
Compare that to €8/unit outsourcing with zero fixed overhead, zero utilisation risk, and zero cover needed during holiday or illness.
The case for outsourcing
At €8/unit for 1–99 units/month:
- 50 units/month → €400/month → €4,800/year
- 80 units/month → €640/month → €7,680/year
- 99 units/month → €792/month → €9,504/year
You lose the immediacy of someone in the room. You gain predictable costs, zero fixed overhead, and the ability to scale from 10 to 200 units per month without a hiring process or licence purchase.
The hybrid model — what most labs settle on
Many labs find the most efficient configuration is a hybrid: one in-house designer handles complex, client-facing cases and quality review; outsourcing absorbs volume overflow, routine crown and bridge, holiday cover, and any indication types the in-house designer doesn’t cover (full-arch, implant libraries, etc.).
This model uses in-house expertise where it matters most and routes cost-sensitive volume through outsourcing — without carrying the full fixed-cost risk of a fully in-house operation.
At what volume does in-house make sense?
Purely on cost arithmetic, a full-time hire starts to make financial sense when monthly volume consistently exceeds 300–350 units and utilisation is reliably high. Below that threshold, outsourcing is almost always cheaper on a per-unit basis — even before accounting for recruitment time, turnover risk, and the hidden cost of covering sickness and holiday.
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