- Offshore means hiring eight to twelve hours away. Nearshore means hiring inside your own working hours for about the same money.
- Offshore is the wrong call when your developer needs same-day answers from your product lead or your designer.
- Count the hours both teams are at a desk before you pick a country, because the overlap decides everything else.
- Screen in this order: spoken English, real working hours, then code the developer wrote themselves.
- Plan ten working days of onboarding before a new developer is useful, and your company owns that work, not the agency.
What does it cost to hire offshore developers?
It costs $1,800 to $3,000 a month to hire offshore developers through an agency in Latin America. The range moves with experience, not with the country they live in.
The same job in the US pays far more. The federal wage survey puts the median pay for a software developer at about $136,000 a year, or $65 an hour. Your company also owes employer payroll tax of 7.65 cents on every dollar up to the yearly cap. So that developer really costs about $146,000, before health insurance, a laptop or paid time off.
Side by side, the agency hire comes in 50 to 70 percent cheaper. We publish the figures role by role in our salary guide, so you can check the job you are filling.
The cheapest quotes deserve one warning. Some firms bill you $2,000 a month and pay the developer a few hundred dollars of it. The firm keeps the rest, that developer quits inside a year, and you pay the hiring cost a second time.
We work on a smaller margin because we earn from placements that last, which is why I would rather tell you not to hire than send you somebody who will leave. So what do you do first with a number like that? You find out whether the hours work at all.
Step one: Is offshore wrong for your team?
Offshore is the wrong answer when your developer has to talk to your product lead or your designer the same day. A ten-hour gap turns every question into a next-day answer. Two questions in a row cost you two days.
Here is how to test it before you spend anything:
Count the hours your team is at a desk, then how many of those the other country is at a desk too. If you hire developers in Brazil, Colombia or Mexico, you get seven or eight, inside normal hours on both sides. A developer keeping normal hours in India or the Philippines is asleep for every one of yours.
Plenty of offshore teams work nights to buy you two or three hours. Ask whether they will still want those hours in month six.
No overlap at all works for a developer building from a written plan nobody changes. It does not work for a product that changes weekly, or for a lone developer who has to ask your designer what a screen is for.
Nearshore software development means picking a country close to your own time zone instead of a far-away one. The developers cost about the same, so a cheap hourly rate is not the same as a cheap hire. I set the two models side by side in nearshore versus offshore staffing.
Step two: Which hiring model should you pick?
Four models exist, and the one you pick decides who carries the risk. A freelancer costs least per hour and leaves soonest. An agency placement costs more and comes with somebody to call.
Here is what each one buys you:
A freelancer you find yourself is the cheapest and the least safe. You do the interviews, you chase the bills, and nobody replaces the person if they vanish halfway through.
Staff augmentation means renting a developer from an agency to work inside the team you already have. They report to your lead, so you keep the managing and the agency does the hiring.
A dedicated placement gives you a named developer, checked before you ever meet them. The deal runs month to month, so you are not locked in.
Direct hire makes the developer your own staff from day one. We charge a flat 25 percent of first-year salary for that, and the placement carries a 30-day replacement guarantee. I break the fee down in direct hire recruiting fees.
Picking the model is the easy half. The next question is simpler and harder: what are you actually asking this person to do?
Step three: What do you write down before you look?
Write down three things before you read a single resume. The work, the hours, and the person who answers questions. If you skip any of the three, you will interview people you cannot use.
The work means a real task from the last month, not a list of technologies. "Rebuild the checkout so saved cards work on mobile" tells a developer whether they can do it. "Senior React developer" does not.
The hours mean the window you need them at a desk. Say "9am to 1pm Eastern, every weekday" rather than "some overlap". Overlap quietly disappears after the first month unless you wrote it down.
Nobody writes down the person who answers questions, and first hires sink on it. A developer in another country cannot guess what your product is for. Name who they ask, and tell that person they are on the hook. Most people guess wrong about which of the three matters most, and it is the hours.
Step four: What should you screen for?
Screen for three things, in this order: spoken English, real working hours, and code they wrote themselves. A developer can pass a written test in perfect English and still be unable to hold a conversation on a call.
Spoken English comes first because it fails most often and a resume never shows it. Get them on a video call and ask them to explain a bug they fixed. If you are following along rather than guessing, that is a pass.
Working hours need a direct question. Ask which hours they will be at a desk in your time zone, and what else already sits in that window. A second job in those hours surfaces in week three.
For the code, give them a small piece of your real problem and pay for the hour. How our hiring process works sets out the checks we run before anybody reaches a client.
Step five: How long until they are useful?
Expect two weeks before a new developer is useful, and plan for it rather than hope. Underestimating those two weeks is the biggest mistake I see on a first hire abroad.
Here is what the two weeks hold:
Days one to three go on access: the code, the test site, the design files, the password manager. Days four to seven go on context, which means why the product is built as it is and which parts nobody may break. The second week is the first real task, reviewed closely.
Your company owns all of that, not the developer and not the agency. You give the training, the context, the expectations, the access and the communication.
A developer idle on day four with no access to the code is not a slow developer. Nobody onboarded them. Ten working days of your own attention is the real price of a first hire, and no quote will show it. Nobody plans for what happens when those two weeks pass and it still is not working.
Step six: What happens when it goes wrong?
Ask who steps in when the work goes wrong, and get that answer before you sign anything. Hire a developer directly and the answer is you, on your own time, under employment rules you have not read.
A new working relationship always needs fixing in the first few months. A developer misreads a priority, or your lead gives feedback that reads as harsh in translation, or the hours drift until the overlap is gone.
We step in when that happens, on either side. Somebody who has had the conversation a hundred times before settles it between you. Companies that hire direct struggle most with exactly this.
The other half is paperwork. A contractor in Colombia or Mexico is covered by that country's labor rules, not yours. I walk through what that means in contractor versus employee in Latin America.
What you have once it is working
Once the hire works out, you have a developer at a desk inside your own working hours. You ask a question at 10am and you have an answer before lunch.
The work stops coming back. Your lead reviews code instead of rewriting it, and the weekly call is about what to build next rather than what went wrong. After those first two weeks there is nothing left to re-explain.
The money holds too. One developer at $2,400 a month costs less in a year than a US hire costs in two months. Most of our clients put that difference into a second developer before the year is out.
How we handle it at Remote Hero
We help US companies hire remote developers in Latin America, and we send you only the ones who fit your hours and your job. First candidates reach you in two to four weeks, and the engagement runs month to month.
You sign one agreement with us, and we engage and pay the contractor. The developer works directly with your team. We set it up the same way in every country we hire from. Nobody on your side files forms abroad.
Want to know whether this fits before you commit? Book a call and I will tell you plainly if it does not.
