How we compare with your other options
Offshore engineers are one of five ways to solve a capacity problem. Here is the honest comparison, including the cases where another option is the better answer.
Buyers in this category report that the information they find is plentiful and contradictory — five vendor sites, five sets of numbers, none comparable. The usual response is to shrink the decision to something smaller and safer than the one that would actually help.
So this page is one table, with the same dimensions applied to every option, including ours. Where another option wins, it says so.
Side by side
| Us, offshore from India | Hire locally | Local staffing agency | Freelance marketplace | Nearshore vendor | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per senior engineer, monthly | $4,480–6,080/month all-inclusive | $13,000–20,000 loaded (salary, taxes, benefits, equipment) | $18,000–26,000 at a 35–50% markup on contract rate | $9,000–20,000, highly variable by platform and vetting | $8,000–14,000 (Poland, Romania, Mexico, Colombia) |
| Time from decision to someone working | Shortlist in 48 hours, working inside two weeks | 3–5 months, longer for scarce stacks | 2–6 weeks | Days, if you accept the vetting risk | 3–6 weeks |
| One-off fees | None | 15–25% of first-year salary if agency-recruited | None, the markup is ongoing | Platform fee, 5–20% | Usually none |
| Overlap with your working day | 4–8 hours, contracted | Full | Full | Whatever the individual offers | 6–8 hours |
| If the person is wrong | Replaced at our cost in the first two weeks, bench behind them | A performance process, then a rehire. Months. | Replaced, usually with a new markup and a new ramp | You start the search again | Replaced, bench depth varies |
| Who carries employment risk | We do — they are our employees in India | You do | The agency, usually | Nobody. Classification is your exposure | The vendor |
| Security and compliance posture | ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, DPA and transfer terms per market | Your own controls | Varies; often the worker's own device | Effectively none; no DPA, no audited controls | Varies; EU vendors sit inside the EU for transfers |
| Scaling from 1 to 10 people | Routine, same rate band | A year of recruiting | Possible, markup compounds | Impractical — quality variance multiplies | Harder; smaller markets, rates inflate |
| Where it genuinely wins | Depth and scale: enterprise stacks, QA volume, data, support that runs around the clock | Work needing hour-by-hour collaboration, deep product context, or physical presence | Short local cover and roles you will convert to permanent quickly | Small, well-specified, self-contained pieces of work | Live collaborative product work, and anything that must stay inside the EU |
| Where it is the wrong answer | No technical owner on your side, or work that cannot leave your legal perimeter | Budget exists but the local market does not have the skill | You need more than two or three people, or the markup is opaque | Anything ongoing, security-sensitive, or needing accountability | You need to go from five people to thirty without the rate doubling |
Our column is our own published rates and contract terms. The other four columns are market ranges drawn from published rate cards and salary data, current as of 2026 — treat them as a starting point for your own finance team's numbers, not as quotes.
The decision underneath
The question is rarely cost
Research into how clients actually select offshore vendors is unusually clear on one point: cost saving should not be the driving factor, and the buyers who choose on price alone are the ones who report the worst outcomes. What separates the engagements that work is whether there is a technical owner on the client side, whether the scope is defined, and whether both sides agreed what good looks like before anyone started.
If you have those three things, offshore works and the cost difference is a bonus. If you do not, no vendor on this table will save you — and we would rather say that now than in month four.
Four questions that get you to the right engagement modelArtefacts for making the case internally
Questions
Comparing the options
- Why publish a comparison that recommends your competitors?
- Because you are going to make this comparison anyway, and the version you assemble from five vendor sites will contradict itself. One table that states the trade-offs honestly is more useful to you — and it means the conversation starts from whether offshore fits, rather than from whether we are exaggerating.
- How did you work out the local-hire numbers?
- Loaded cost means salary plus employer taxes, benefits, equipment, software and recruitment amortised over the first year — typically 1.25–1.4× base salary in the US and UK. The figures are market ranges for a senior engineer, not quotes. Your own finance team will have better numbers for your market, and the comparison is more useful with theirs.
- What does your rate actually include?
- Everything except licences for your own systems. $28–38/hour for a senior engineer covers salary, all Indian employer costs, a managed laptop with endpoint protection, recruitment and replacement, and account management. No setup fee, no recruitment fee, no management percentage. The breakdown is on the rates page.
- Should we use more than one of these at once?
- Larger teams often do: local or nearshore for the work that needs live collaboration, offshore for depth and volume. Below about fifteen engineers the overhead of managing two vendors usually outweighs the benefit.
Test it on one role
The cheapest way to settle this is a single role brief. Three shortlisted CVs in 48 hours, each with its rate and notice period, and you interview them against the local candidates you are already seeing.