Offshore web and software development for UK businesses

UK agency day rates for competent development sit broadly between four hundred and fifty and nine hundred pounds, higher in London and higher again for anything touching regulated industries. The bands below are indicative for original work with us, and the honest comparison includes the coordination overhead that any offshore engagement carries.

India is five and a half hours ahead of GMT, four and a half under British Summer Time. Our 09:30 to 19:30 IST working day is 04:00 to 14:00 in London. The overlap with a normal British working day is therefore from nine in the morning until two in the afternoon, which is about five hours.

That changes the character of the engagement compared with, say, Australia or the Caribbean. Live calls can be scheduled at normal hours for both sides without anyone working late. A problem discovered at half past nine in London is being worked on within minutes rather than the following day. Code review, pairing and design discussion all become practical in real time.

It also means we can run genuinely agile engagements with British clients rather than the heavily documented, batch-oriented process that large time gaps force. Daily standups work. So does dropping into a call for ten minutes to resolve something rather than writing three paragraphs about it.

The residual gap is our afternoon, which is your early morning, and that is useful rather than problematic: work lands overnight from your perspective, so there is progress to review when you start.

India does not hold a UK adequacy decision. Any transfer of personal data from the UK to us therefore requires an appropriate safeguard under Article 46, and in practice that means either the International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, supported by a transfer risk assessment.

We sign the IDTA as a matter of course and will complete your transfer risk assessment questionnaire. We are not going to pretend this is a formality: your data protection officer will want to know where data is stored, who has access, what technical measures apply and what happens on termination, and those answers need to be specific rather than reassuring. Ours are documented and we will put them in writing before you commit to anything.

For a great many projects the cleanest answer is to avoid the question. If we do not need production personal data to build what you are asking for, we should not have it. Working with anonymised or synthetic datasets in development, with production access restricted to named individuals under logged conditions, removes most of the transfer exposure and is usually no harder to build against. We propose that by default and only argue for broader access where there is a real reason.

We are not UK solicitors and none of this is legal advice. Your data protection officer or legal adviser should review any arrangement involving personal data.

London in particular has a large agency sector that subcontracts a substantial proportion of its delivery, usually quietly. There is nothing wrong with this and it is worth being open about, because the arrangement works well when both sides are clear.

You own the client, the brief, the design direction and the commercial relationship. We supply engineering, working inside your repository, following your conventions and coding standards, and reviewing against your definition of done. Our name appears nowhere unless you want it to. We will not contact your client during the engagement or approach them afterwards, and that is a contractual term rather than a promise.

For agencies the value is capacity without permanent cost. A studio that wins a large build faces three options: decline it, hire and then carry the cost through the next quiet quarter, or subcontract. For most independent studios the third is the only one that does not distort the business, and the risk in it is entirely about who you choose.

We can take a fully specified design and build it, or come in earlier and do technical architecture alongside your design process. Most of our agency work is the former, and the engagements that run best are the ones where we are brought in before the design is finalised so we can flag the parts that will be expensive to build before they are sold.

The West Midlands and the North are where we are most obviously useful, because the industrial profile is close to our Indian client base. An established Birmingham manufacturer running on spreadsheets and a system nobody has upgraded since 2016 has almost exactly the problem a Howrah engineering firm has, and the systems that solve it are the same: job costing that reflects reality, production tracking against orders, material reconciliation, supplier portals.

eCommerce is the second strong area, and Manchester and Leeds are where most of it comes from. Storefront performance, catalogue scale, faceted navigation that does not degrade at thousands of SKUs, and integration between store, warehouse and accounting are recurring problems we have solved repeatedly.

Professional services websites are a third, less glamorous but consistent: firms whose site has to survive scrutiny from a prospective client who is checking credentials rather than browsing. That is a structure and content problem more than a design one, and it is one we handle well.

Where we are weaker: anything requiring detailed knowledge of UK regulatory or payroll specifics such as HMRC filing formats, IR35 determination logic, or FCA reporting. We can build to a specification, but someone who knows the domain should write it.

We would rather not take a large first project from a new UK client, because it is a bad risk for both of us. A bounded first piece of work tells you more about whether this will succeed than any number of reference calls.

Good candidates are a performance and Core Web Vitals audit with the fixes implemented, one integration that has been sitting on the backlog, a single template built to your design, or a two-week automation of something currently done by hand. Small enough to abandon, real enough to judge.

What you are evaluating is not primarily whether we can code. It is whether we write clearly, whether we raise problems early rather than presenting them at the end, whether the work arrives when we said it would, and whether the code is something your own developers could pick up. Those are the things that determine whether a long engagement works, and none of them are visible in a portfolio.

Call or WhatsApp +91 70033 91355, or send a brief and we will come back with a range and an honest view of whether we are the right fit.