Say you run a 20-person company in Leeds, Denver or Brisbane. You have a quote from an Indian development firm that is well under what a local agency asked for, and you are trying to work out where the catch is. Usually the catch is not the quality of the code. It is everything around the code: a vague contract, payments that run ahead of delivered work, meeting times nobody planned for, and IP paperwork that does not actually transfer ownership.
This guide is for businesses in the US, UK and Australia that want to hire offshore developers in India and go in with their eyes open. We are an Indian team ourselves, so we will be specific about what to ask for, including from us.
The real cost is the rate plus your own time
Hourly rates for developers at established Indian firms commonly sit somewhere between $20 and $50, with individual freelancers often lower and senior specialists in areas like cloud architecture or security higher. Treat that as a rough market range. It moves with seniority, the technology, the engagement model and how much project management is included in the price.
The number that matters is the total cost of reaching a working release. That includes the hours someone on your side spends writing requirements, answering questions and testing builds. Plan for at least a few hours a week of a product owner's time, and more in the first month.
A quick worked comparison. Imagine a booking feature estimated at 300 hours. A local agency at $120 an hour quotes $36,000. An offshore team at $35 an hour quotes $10,500. Your product manager spends an extra 60 hours on clarifications and testing because of the distance; at an internal cost of $60 an hour, that adds $3,600. The offshore route comes to about $14,100.
Now suppose the requirements were thin and the work grows to 450 hours. You are at roughly $19,350. Still cheaper, but the saving shrank by about a quarter, and it shrank because of the brief, not the developers. If you are budgeting an app, our breakdown of what drives mobile app development cost shows how to build that estimate feature by feature.
Overlap hours: the US, UK and Australia are three different problems
India runs on one time zone, IST, which is UTC+5:30 and has no daylight saving. Your country almost certainly does change its clocks, so your overlap with an Indian team moves twice a year.
- UK. India is 4½ hours ahead during British Summer Time and 5½ hours ahead in winter. A team working 10:00 to 19:00 IST overlaps with a London office from 9:00 until about 14:30 in summer and 13:30 in winter. This is the easiest of the three.
- Australia. Sydney and Melbourne are 4½ hours ahead of India in winter and 5½ hours ahead during daylight saving. The Indian morning lands in your afternoon, which gives roughly two to three shared hours a day. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not use daylight saving, so check which city the team is coordinating with.
- US. New York is 9½ hours behind India in summer and 10½ in winter; the West Coast is 12½ to 13½ hours behind. There is no natural overlap, so someone shifts their day. A common arrangement is an Indian team working 12:00 to 21:00 IST, which gives an East Coast team a shared window from 9:00 to 11:30 in summer and until 10:30 in winter.
The clock changes do not happen on the same dates. The US moves on the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. The UK moves on the last Sundays of March and October (the UK government's clock change page lists each year's dates). South-eastern Australia moves in early October and early April. Keep recurring meetings in a calendar that stores the time zone, and check them in those weeks.
How much overlap you need depends on the work. A well-specified build can run on one or two hours a day. Early product discovery, where decisions change daily, needs more. There is more on working with us from each country for companies hiring from the US, for businesses in the UK and for teams in Australia.
Contracts: what to put in writing before you hire offshore developers in India
A good contract with an offshore team is not longer than a local one. It is more precise about five things.
1. Who owns the work, and from when
This is where cross-border deals most often go wrong, because the default rules differ by country. Under India's Copyright Act, 1957, an employer is the first owner of work its employees create in the course of employment unless there is an agreement to the contrary. So an Indian firm normally owns the code its developers write for you until it assigns that ownership to you.
Section 19 of the same Act says an assignment is only valid in writing, signed by the assignor. If it does not state a period, it is deemed to be five years. If it does not state a territory, it is presumed to cover India only. Rights not exercised within a year can also lapse unless the document says otherwise. So ask for an assignment that is worldwide, for the full term of copyright, does not lapse, and takes effect as each milestone is paid. Have a lawyer in your own country review it; this is general information, not legal advice.
2. Scope and change control
Attach the feature list to the contract and say how changes are priced: a written change request, an estimate, your approval, then work. Without that, every small tweak turns into an argument about whether it was included.
3. Confidentiality
Sign an NDA before you share anything sensitive. We sign one before a project starts, and any serious firm should do the same without fuss.
4. Termination and handover
State what happens if either side stops: the notice period, payment for work done, and delivery of code, credentials and documentation within a fixed number of days.
5. Governing law and disputes
Choose a governing law and a dispute process, often arbitration. Be realistic about it: pursuing a claim across borders is slow and expensive. The clause matters, but a payment structure that never lets you get far ahead of delivered work protects you more.
Payments: milestones, currency and tax paperwork
Tie payments to things you can see and test, not to dates. A workable pattern is a small first milestone, such as a clickable prototype or one working feature on a staging server, followed by a milestone for each group of features, each paid after you have tested it. Some firms, ours included, will start with a single paid milestone so you can judge the work before committing to the rest.
Agree the invoice currency. If you are invoiced in USD, GBP or AUD, the vendor carries the exchange-rate risk; if you pay in rupees, you carry it. Agree who pays the bank transfer fees as well, because intermediary banks can take a cut from international wires, and an invoice that arrives short causes needless back-and-forth.
Two pieces of paperwork catch people out:
- Indian GST. A registered supplier that files a Letter of Undertaking for the financial year can provide services to a client outside India without paying integrated GST, as the GST portal's guide to the LUT explains. If an Indian vendor adds GST to an invoice for your overseas company, ask why before you pay.
- Your own tax records. US businesses paying a foreign company usually request IRS Form W-8BEN-E, which the foreign entity uses to document its status for US withholding purposes. The vendor gives it to you; it is not sent to the IRS. UK and Australian businesses should ask their accountant how services bought from abroad are treated for VAT or GST.
Communication that holds up across the distance
Distance turns small delays into big ones. A question asked at the end of the Indian day and answered at the start of yours has already cost a day. Three habits prevent most of that:
- Talk to the people writing the code. With us, clients talk directly to the engineers on their project, which removes a layer where details get lost. Whoever you hire, ask for the same.
- Get a short written update at the end of each Indian working day: what was done, what is next, and what is blocked and waiting on whom.
- See working software every week or two on a staging link you can click through yourself. Screenshots and status reports are not progress.
Name one person on your side who can make product decisions. A team getting instructions from three people will build the average of all three.
Accounts and access from day one
- The code repository sits in your own GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket organization, with the vendor's developers added as members. When we build for a client, the client owns the source code and has repository access throughout.
- Hosting, domains, app store developer accounts and third-party services such as payments, email and maps are registered to your company and billed to you, with the vendor given role-based access.
- Passwords and API keys live in a shared password manager or secrets store, never in chat messages.
- When someone leaves the project, you can remove their access in minutes because you hold the admin rights.
If a vendor resists any of this, treat it as a preview of how the handover will go.
When offshore is the wrong call
We would advise against it if nobody on your side has time to own the product, because distance magnifies an absent owner. The same goes for work that needs people in the room, such as hardware integration on your premises, and for projects where customers or a regulator require data or staff to stay in a particular country; check that before you collect quotes. And if you only need a five-page brochure site, a good template and a local freelancer may cost less than the coordination.
If you are comparing offshore firms now, send each one the same short brief and ask for three things back: how they would split the work into paid milestones, the exact wording of their IP assignment clause, and which hours they would overlap with you. The answers will separate careful firms from the rest faster than any sales call.
If you would like to see how we would structure your project, you can look at the ways to hire our developers and send us your brief. Every enquiry gets a reply within 24 hours, and you can ask us all three questions above.
