What offshore IT outsourcing actually costs

We read the pages that currently rank for the obvious buying terms — offshore IT outsourcing, managed DevOps services, AWS managed services, DevOps consulting. Eight of the most substantial ones carry a heading that promises to answer what it costs. One is titled, word for word, 'How Much Do AWS Managed Services Cost?'. Between them they contain no rates, no retainers, no project bands, no response times and no onboarding timelines. The cost sections are real; the costs are not in them.

What they contain instead is pricing philosophy: that it varies with scope, that it depends on the number of instances, that models include a percentage of cloud spend or a flat retainer or a per-resource fee. All true, and none of it helps someone trying to work out whether to put a number in next quarter's budget.

So this is the version with the numbers in it. These are the bands we actually quote, what moves a client up or down inside them, what the rate includes, and what it does not. Where a figure is ours we say so. Where it comes from someone else we link it.

Our rates, stated

We sell engineering capacity by the month, per named engineer, with thirty days' notice. The rate is all-inclusive: employment, payroll, statutory cost, equipment, leave cover, the bench behind the person, and the delivery lead above two engineers. There is no setup fee and no recruitment fee.

Three seniority tiers, priced per hour for a US client and billed on a 160-hour month:

• Build — $20 to $28 an hour, about $3,200 to $4,480 a month. Two to five years, works inside an existing standard under a technical lead.
• Senior — $28 to $38 an hour, about $4,480 to $6,080 a month. Five to nine years, owns a workstream, reviews other people's code.
• Lead — $38 to $52 an hour, about $6,080 to $8,320 a month. Nine years and up, sets the standard, owns architecture decisions. Most DevOps and cloud work sits here because the scarcity is real.

UK, Australian, Canadian and UAE bands are published in the same place and derived the same way. The live figures are on our rates page and in a single file in the codebase, so the hourly, daily and monthly numbers on every page of this site are generated from one source and cannot drift apart from each other.

A band is not a quote. What we will not do is give a number before someone has described the work — not because the rate is secret, but because the tier is a judgement about the role and we would rather make it in front of you.

What moves you inside the band

The spread inside a tier is roughly forty per cent, which is wide enough that it is worth knowing what drives it. In our quoting it is these, in this order:

1. 01Scarcity of the specific stack. A Terraform and Kubernetes operator with real production incident history prices near the top of the lead band. A competent generalist Linux administrator prices near the bottom of build.
2. 02Overlap demanded. Four hours of overlap with US Eastern is an ordinary Indian evening shift. Eight hours is a night shift, and night shifts cost more because they cost the engineer more.
3. 03Commitment length. A three-month pilot prices above a twelve-month engagement, because the bench behind a short engagement is harder to plan.
4. 04Compliance load. If your environment requires named individual access under your IAM, evidence collection for an audit, or a restricted-access working arrangement, that is real overhead and it is priced rather than absorbed quietly.
5. 05Number of seats. The delivery lead above two engineers is included rather than billed, which makes a pod of four cheaper per head than two separate engineers.

Why $20 an hour and $52 an hour are not the same person

This is the question the band invites and almost nobody answers, so here it is plainly. Accelerance, who benchmark offshore rates across sixty partner firms, put Asia at $24 to $31 an hour for junior developers and $31 to $41 for senior, with rates down about 8% year on year. Our floor is below their junior figure and our ceiling is above their senior one. Both of those facts are worth explaining rather than leaving for you to interpret.

The floor is low because the build tier is genuinely a build tier: someone with two to five years who is productive inside an existing standard, with a lead reviewing their work. That is a real and useful hire, and it is not the person you want owning your cloud account. We would rather publish an honest floor than quote a flattering average and then staff to the bottom of it.

The ceiling is above the regional senior band because the lead tier competes against Latin America rather than against Asia. Accelerance puts LatAm senior at $60 to $75 an hour. If what you need is architecture ownership and incident command, your real alternatives are a LatAm senior engineer at that rate or a US hire at several times it — and we are priced against those, not against a regional average.

The thing an experienced buyer is actually testing for here is bench quality. The honest industry answer is that a cheap offshore rate often buys a recent graduate presented as a mid-level engineer. Our defence against that claim is not an adjective, it is the vetting ratio we publish, the fact that you interview every shortlisted candidate before anyone starts, and that the engineer you meet is the engineer who does the work. Ask any vendor to commit to that third one in writing.

What the rate does not include

This is the part most vendor pages leave to the contract, and it is where budgets break.

• Cloud spend. Your AWS, Azure or GCP bill stays yours, on your account. We will work to reduce it and report the saving, but we do not resell it and we do not take a percentage of it.
• Third-party licences and tooling. Monitoring, CI minutes, security scanning, whatever your stack needs.
• Travel, in the rare engagements where it is wanted.
• Your own management time, which is not zero. An augmented engineer needs a technical lead, a ticket queue and a code review standard. If you do not have those, outsourcing individual engineers is the wrong purchase and a managed pod or a fixed-scope project is cheaper for you.

The four pricing models, and when each is right

Per engineer, monthly

What we default to. Predictable, easy to budget, easy to stop. Right when the work is ongoing and the scope will keep changing — which describes most infrastructure and most product engineering.

Fixed scope, fixed price

Right when the work genuinely has an end: a migration, a Terraform rewrite, an audit remediation, a pipeline rebuild. If your work fits this shape, it is usually cheaper for you than a monthly seat, and a vendor who will not offer it for a well-defined piece of work is telling you something.

Retainer for a managed estate

A block of hours with an agreed response time, right for system administration and monitoring where the work is real but lumpy. The number that matters here is not the monthly fee, it is the response time, and you should refuse to buy this without one written down.

Percentage of cloud spend

Common among AWS managed-service providers and the model we decline. It pays the vendor more when your bill goes up, which is precisely backwards for anyone hired partly to bring it down. If a provider quotes you this, ask what happens to their fee in a quarter where they halve your spend.

What other people publish

For calibration, here is what the small number of vendors who do publish rates are saying. None of them cite a source for their figures, so treat them as asking prices rather than market data — but asking prices are still more use than silence.

• Aalpha publishes regional DevOps consultant bands: North America $125–$300 an hour, Western Europe $100–$250, Eastern Europe $50–$150, Asia including India $25–$50, Australia $100–$250.
• Acquaint Softtech publishes $22 an hour and $3,200 a month for 160 hours, with costed pieces of work — a CI/CD build from scratch at $440–$660, a cloud bill diagnosis at $1,760–$2,640.
• Dilig publishes project bands: MVP infrastructure $20k–$30k, full CI/CD with containerisation and IaC $30k–$60k, multi-environment with monitoring and security $50k–$90k and up; hourly $40–$75; retainers $3,000–$8,000 a month.
• Dysnix, in the course of arguing for outsourcing, publishes the comparison most vendors avoid: a LatAm DevOps salary around $54,000 a year against roughly $161,500 in the US.

Our bands sit below the North American and Western European numbers and inside the Asia band, which is what you would expect and is the entire commercial premise. The gap between $25 and $50 inside that Asia band is the one worth interrogating, because it is the difference between a generalist and someone who has run the thing you are asking them to run.

What to ask a vendor who will not quote

Plenty of good firms decline to publish rates for defensible reasons. That is fine; what is not fine is a conversation that never produces a number. Four questions that tend to end the evasion:

1. 01What is the all-in monthly cost of one engineer at the seniority you are recommending, assuming a 160-hour month? Not a range across all roles — this role.
2. 02What is in that figure and what is billed separately? Specifically: cloud spend, licences, onboarding, recruitment, the delivery lead.
3. 03What is the notice period, and what does it cost me to stop in month two?
4. 04What is the response time you will commit to in writing, and what happens if you miss it?

If the fourth question produces a link to an SLA document rather than a figure, read the document. In the set of pages we reviewed, the only vendor who linked an SLA was also the only one who declined to quote any number from it.

When this is the wrong purchase

Offshore outsourcing is cheaper per hour and it is not cheaper per outcome in every situation. We turn work away on these grounds, and it is worth knowing them before you spend the budget:

• You have no in-house technical leadership. Augmentation amplifies an engineering function; it cannot replace one.
• The work needs four hours of synchronous collaboration a day with a US West Coast team. The overlap arithmetic does not work and anyone who tells you it does is selling.
• The task is small, defined and one-off. The onboarding cost will exceed the saving.
• Your data cannot leave a jurisdiction. Check this before the commercial conversation, not after.

The short version

Offshore IT outsourcing from India costs roughly $20 to $52 an hour depending on seniority, or about $3,200 to $8,320 a month per engineer on a 160-hour month, all-inclusive, with cloud spend and licences on top and your own management time on top of that. A vendor who cannot put a number against your specific role on the first call is either not listening or not confident, and both are worth knowing early.

Our full rate bands across the US, UK, Australia, Canada and the UAE are published on the rates page, alongside the four commitments we hold ourselves to on shortlist speed, onboarding, vetting ratio and retention.

Sahil Dubey

Group Managing Director

Runs engineering and compliance across the group. Twenty years in infrastructure, most of it on the operations side of systems that were already in production when he inherited them.

• CISA
• AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate