Outsourcing Developers: Models, Risks, and Costs

What are the advantages of outsourcing?

The biggest advantage is access to skills you don't have on staff, without building every one in-house. You also skip the full cost of a hire. Employer taxes and benefits push it well past the salary, and what a web hire costs shows each line.

Other advantages for a small agency:

• You stop being the bottleneck. Work keeps moving while you're on sales calls.
• You pay for the setup that fits. Per project, by the hour, or as a team.
• You can scale up or down. Add work in a busy month without a new hire.

Where can you outsource developers: onshore, nearshore or offshore?

You can outsource developers in your own country (onshore), to a nearby country (nearshore), or to a country farther away (offshore).

• Onshore means using a team in your own country.
• Nearshore means moving business work to a nearby foreign country.
• Offshore means having work done in another country, often because costs are lower there.

DeskTeam360's production team is in one physical office in Indonesia, managed by a North American account manager. For the three side by side, see nearshore vs offshore.

How do you make outsourcing successful?

Settle ownership and logins first, start with one small task, and have one person check every piece of work. These steps keep it on track:

1. List what goes out. Every web job from last month, small ones too.
2. Pick a model from the table above.
3. Choose the partner. Ask who does the work, if it's the same person each month, who checks it, and whose name the accounts are in.
4. Sign an agreement on who owns the code, design files and content.
5. Keep hosting, domain and logins in your name. Give each helper their own access.
6. Start with one small, paid task. See how they ask questions and handle changes.
7. Have one person check the work before your client sees it. At DeskTeam360, a North American account manager does this.
8. Keep the same people if you can. They learn your standards over time.

The step-by-step guide covers each step in full. To bring someone on directly, see hire a dedicated developer or hire remote developers.

Sidecar Marketing Solutions is a good case. This small-business marketing agency dates back to 2012, and its clients are solo owners and small firms. For years its founder pieced work together from separate contractors, each on a narrow job, and it felt siloed. Other services in this space had let the founder down before. A Duct Tape Marketing summit in fall 2022 led to a talk with Jeremy, and work with DeskTeam360 began in January 2023. Job one was a homepage, built from a sketch and copy the founder drew up. These days the team builds whole pages and page sections for Sidecar's clients, and the founder saves thousands of dollars a month without hiring one-skill specialists.