Hiring app developers in India: a US and UK startup checklist

Hiring a development team in India can give a US or UK startup senior engineers at a price that makes the runway last. It can also go badly, and when it does the cause is almost never talent. It is unclear contracts, code held hostage, silent weeks and invoices that grow. This checklist covers what to settle before you sign, and what a good answer looks like.

1. Contracts and who owns the code

• A proper MSA and SOW your counsel can read, not a one-page quote.
• IP assignment: everything built for you should be assigned to you on payment, with no licence kept by the vendor and no reuse of your code on other projects.
• An NDA signed before you share anything, yours or a mutual template.
• Paperwork your finance team needs, such as a W-8BEN-E for US companies.

If the code does not live in your repository from the first week, you do not really own it yet.

Insist that the code lives in your own GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket organisation from the first commit. Then there is nothing to hand over at the end, because it was never anywhere else. Our security and trust page sets out exactly how we handle contracts, access and data, and it is the document we send to security questionnaires.

2. Time zones, designed around rather than ignored

Our core day is 9:30am to 6:30pm India time. For a US team that means the day's work is finished and written up as yours begins, and we keep a standing call window for planning and demos: about 8 to 10am on the East Coast and 7:30 to 9am on the West Coast. For the UK and Europe the overlap is easier: the Indian working day covers your morning and early afternoon.

Ask any vendor for these three things:

• A fixed weekly demo, live, with a recording if you miss it
• A short written update you can forward to your board
• A named lead you can reach outside the call window when something is urgent

The details for each region are on our pages for US companies and UK companies.

3. How you pay, and in what currency

• Invoices in USD, by wire, ACH, card, SWIFT transfer or Wise.
• No Indian GST should be added: software work for a client abroad is an export of services, invoiced under a Letter of Undertaking (LUT).
• Payment in stages tied to demos, so you only pay for work you have seen.

4. Fixed project or dedicated developers

There are two good models, and the right one depends on how settled your scope is.

• A fixed-price project suits a defined product: an MVP, a rebuild, a new app. You get a price and timeline before work starts.
• Dedicated developers suit a team whose roadmap has outgrown its headcount. Engineers join your stand-ups, your issue tracker and your code review, billed monthly. See how this works on our hire dedicated developers page.

5. Ask for the price broken down

A real estimate lists the screens, the features and the days behind each. If a vendor can only give you a single number, you cannot compare them or cut scope sensibly.

You can see what this looks like in our free App Cost Calculator, which opens in US dollars for clients outside India. For example, an online shop app for Android and iPhone, with payments and an admin panel, comes to about $37,645 with no GST and takes about 8 weeks. A food delivery app with maps and live tracking is about $41,513 and about 9 weeks.

6. Security from the first day

• Two-factor authentication on every account that touches your systems
• No shared logins: named accounts with the least access the work needs
• No production data on laptops; development runs on anonymised or test data
• Every change reviewed by a senior engineer before it merges, with tests and secret scanning in CI
• Access revoked on the day someone leaves the project, with a list sent to you

Red flags

• They want to host the code or the app store account themselves.
• They cannot name the people who will work on your product.
• Every answer is "yes", including to the things that are a bad idea.
• There is no demo for weeks, only status reports.
• The price is a single number with no breakdown.

How we start

A short call about your product and your team, then a written proposal with a fixed price and timeline within 48 hours. Get in touch and we will set up a call in your working hours.