Why Offshore Dev Services May Not Be Worth the "Savings"

In recent years, offshore firms have grown in appeal as a seemingly low-cost option for digital development services. For some businesses, especially startups, it seems the only way to expand the development team while cutting costs is by using offshore resources.

At first glance, working with an offshore company seems like a viable option. The lower costs and large talent pool are very appealing. However, in our experience we’ve found that often these companies come with problems that offset any of the cost savings achieved by looking offshore. In fact, Appstem has increasingly been taking on “rescue projects” for clients who started development work with another firm, but ran into a variety of problems and turned to us for help. 

In many cases, we’ve inherited projects from other firms or in-house teams and have had to stabilize or innovate the app so the client can get it to market on an efficient timeline.

“It’s not like for like,” said Robert Armstrong, CEO of Appstem. “One hour of inexpensive development time isn’t the same as getting a high quality product that stays on budget and on deadline.”

Communication issues, time zone differences and inconsistent quality all play a role in why companies are turning to Appstem to turn around and improve their products. In countries where English is not the primary language, communication can be challenging, not only in laying out clear expectations but also in ways we think are simple like grammar and colloquial language. Time zones can slow the work down too. If you need to reach your offshore team, your working hours may be in the middle of the night for them, forcing responses to wait an entire day to be seen and processed. Perhaps most importantly, it’s difficult to oversee progress.

A client who will soon be launching a new social media video streaming app came to Appstem because his project was on its third development firm and it was at a standstill. With a new startup, he didn’t know what to look for in a firm and that ended up costing him years and a lot of money. A crash issue that was discovered in June 2022, was still not fixed when he reached out to Appstem early this year.

“It had become a money pit,” he said. “Communication was terrible and they could never get the project right - grammar issues, translation issues, bugs and glitches. Plus every change we needed to make cost thousands of dollars pushing us way over budget and behind schedule.”

Before cutting ties, he had spent four times his original quote and the app was still not ready to be launched.

He started researching top development firms and felt he wanted a team from the Bay Area - the home of tech innovation. He immediately clicked with Robert and other members of the team and saw they understood his goals. 

“They had great ideas and were sympathetic to my situation,” he said. “They’ve already started working on solutions and we have a real timeline to follow. We just got started last month but we’re on track to launch my app by Q4 2023.”

“We can stabilize, optimize and improve digital products, by creating a clear strategy and distinct deliverables - a seamless and proven process to rescue these projects and get them successfully to market,” Armstrong said.

If you have a project that has stalled or are looking for new ideas from a team with a proven record of getting development back on track, contact us at hello@appstem.com.