+1 on this. There's a big difference for some between the 15 dollar whiskey and the 35 dollar whiskey, probably another jump between 35 and 80 dollar whiskey, and then after that it starts getting into crazy marginal gains. If you drink 15 dollar whiskey you'd get 90% of your gains from just bumping it up to 35 versus going straight for the 300 dollar bottle.
Same it was with me for coffee, I enjoy single origin vs supermarket coffee, but after that it got to a point where I couldn't realistically make up the difference.
There seems to be an 80/20 effect here on how much you should deep-dive into these tangent domains in your life.
OP here - A good freelancer gets you a long way. What I found is that during the development process, people hit edge cases and have questions... doing a lot of the discovery and thinking yourself helps you answer those questions faster.
Alternatively, if you find a freelancer within your budget that can stick with you until the feature is out of the door is a great win.
When a company like Uber takes a cut from the driver, a part of that money is used to pay for the people that work for the app, but there are a lot of non-technical useful roles that keep the wheels turning: support functions like customer support / incidents / legal and onboarding teams make sure that the drivers and clients are safe and that they are not breaking any laws.
Liability is a second thing. Cost is one of the factors that might make people swing to other apps, but you also want an experience that is legal and safe, and at Uber's scale it takes quite a lot of people to synchronise this, as the liability for things like that belong to Uber and not the driver.