Offshore software development outsourcing at udata starts at $20 an hour for a dedicated backend or frontend engineer, and the team is normally working on your codebase within 3 to 7 days. That is the short version. The longer one is about which parts of a build survive a time zone gap and which parts quietly fall apart because nobody in your building owns them anymore.
We are an offshore software development company based in Ukraine — 50+ engineers, founded in 2023, delivering for product companies in the US and Western Europe. Below: how the team is assembled, what the hiring step looks like, what offshore software development services actually cost against a Ukrainian rate card, and the point where this model stops being the right answer. If you are still deciding between vendor models in general, start with the parent page on software development outsourcing and come back here for the geography.
The part vendors skip
A cheap rate card means nothing if scope drifts. Our tracker holds your budget and scope next to the tickets, so you watch spend move in real time instead of asking for a report.
What An Offshore Development Team Looks Like On Day One
An offshore development team is not a body shop order. We read the scope first, then propose a composition — usually a lead, two to four engineers, QA on demand, and a project manager who is not billed separately.
Who Sits On The Team
Roughly 70% of our engineers carry 5+ years of corporate experience, which is the reason a small offshore dev team can hold a production system without a second layer of oversight above it. Offshore developers here work inside your rituals, not parallel to them: your board, your definition of done, your release cadence.
The default shape:
- Engineering lead — owns architecture and code review, talks to your CTO directly
- 2–4 engineers — backend, frontend, mobile or data, depending on what the product needs
- QA engineer — manual testing plus basic automated coverage, engaged on request or when the project needs it
- Project manager — included in the rate, no separate line item
What The Team Builds
Offshore development services at udata cover custom platforms, SaaS products, internal business systems, data pipelines and AI features. Offshore software product development — the full path from discovery through launch and support — is the most common engagement; a narrower offshore development service, like a scraping pipeline or an API integration layer, is also normal and often lands in weeks rather than months.
How To Read The Vendor Market
Offshore development companies look identical on their websites. The differences show up in three places, and you can check all of them before signing:
- Where the budget lives. Ask whether you can see spend against scope without requesting a report. The average offshore software company cannot show you that.
- What exists before the first sprint. We write the SRS to roughly 50% before development starts — scope, architecture, data model — and fill in the rest as the project moves. It is delivered in Notion, detailed down to individual pages and buttons.
- Who replaces a leaving engineer. A 50-person offshore development company can backfill from bench. A 6-person one cannot, whatever the proposal says.
How To Hire An Offshore Development Team Without A Three-Month Procurement Cycle
The gap between "we should try this" and working code is usually procurement, not engineering. Ours runs short on purpose.
- 1Scope call — what the product does, what exists already, what hurts45 min
- 2Composition and rate — named roles, hours, a range1–2 days
- 3Interviews — CV screen, technical interview, culture fitoptional
- 4Contract and kickoff3–7 days
On step three, you can hire dedicated offshore developers yourself instead of accepting an assigned group — CV screen, technical interview, culture fit, the same sequence you would run for a local hire. Most clients do this for the lead and skip it for the rest.
Companies looking for offshore development team capacity usually arrive with one of two problems: a roadmap slipping because internal hiring stalled, or a product that needs to exist before a funding round. Both fit the model. What does not fit is an idea with no owner on your side — offshore or not, a project without a decision-maker in your company burns budget.
The mechanics of the dedicated model — reporting lines, how priorities are set, what you keep control over — are covered in depth on dedicated development team and in our guide on how to hire a dedicated development team. This page stays on the offshore-specific part.
Ukraine As A Delivery Location
Ukraine has been a default location for European product companies for over a decade, and the reasons are practical rather than patriotic. For offshore development Ukraine offers a senior pool deeper than most of Central Europe, working hours that overlap the EU almost entirely, and rates well below Western European contractor pricing. An offshore software development team Ukraine produces tends to be senior-heavy rather than junior-padded.
Time Zones And Overlap
Kyiv runs UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 in summer. For a client in London that is a one-hour offset — effectively a shared working day. Berlin and Amsterdam sit at zero to one hour. New York is seven hours behind Kyiv, so a team on standard hours overlaps roughly 09:00–12:00 Eastern every day — enough for standups, reviews and anything that cannot wait until tomorrow. West Coast clients get a narrower window, and a shifted schedule is something we agree during scoping rather than after the first missed call.
Ukraine offshore development also means daily written status in Slack and a demo at the end of every sprint, so the overlap window is not the only channel you have.
What The Rates Are
These are our numbers, not a market average. Agencies that price against Western budgets quote $45–70 an hour for offshore software development Ukraine engagements. We do not.
| Role | Dedicated model | Project-based |
|---|---|---|
| Backend engineer | $20/hour | $25–40/hour |
| Frontend engineer | $20/hour | $25–40/hour |
| Mobile engineer | $22/hour | $25–40/hour |
| Full-stack engineer | $24/hour | $25–40/hour |
| Data engineer | $25/hour | $25–40/hour |
| QA engineer | $20/hour | $20/hour |
| Project management | Included | Included |
The dedicated rate applies to long-running engagements where an offshore development team Ukraine-side works with you month over month. Short project work is billed higher because the setup and context-loading cost sits inside a smaller number of hours.
Contracts, IP And Leaving
The uncomfortable questions are the ones worth asking early, so here they are answered.
Intellectual property. Everything the team produces belongs to you. Code, designs, documentation, data models. This is written into the contract, not implied by it.
Notice period. Two weeks, either direction. No lock-in, no minimum term dressed up as a discount.
The contract itself. Hiring an offshore software development company Ukraine-side does not put your legal team in front of an unfamiliar document. The agreement is in English and covers scope, rates, IP transfer, confidentiality and termination — the same clauses they review for any vendor. Contracting entity and governing law are confirmed at that stage, before anything is signed.
Continuity. Working with Ukrainian engineers has stayed normal for European clients through the past several years, including under conditions that would stop most vendors. Distributed offices, backup power and connectivity, and engineers spread across cities are the reason delivery has held.
Offshore vs Nearshore Outsourcing: The Honest Comparison
Offshore vs nearshore outsourcing is mostly an argument about hours and money, and the answer changes depending on where you sit.
| Nearshore (for a US client) | Offshore (Ukraine) | |
|---|---|---|
| Overlap with EST | 6–8 hours | 3–4 hours |
| Overlap with CET | 3–5 hours | 8+ hours |
| Typical rate | $35–60/hour | $20–40/hour |
| Senior-level depth | Varies by market | Deep, long-standing engineering base |
For a European company, Ukraine behaves like nearshore in every practical sense and costs like offshore. For a US company, the trade is real: you save 40–60% on rate and give up afternoon overlap. Teams that run asynchronously by default barely notice. Teams that make decisions in unscheduled calls will feel it, and we say so before the contract rather than after.
Offshore IT Services Beyond The Build
Not every engagement is a product build. Offshore IT services we run alongside development include infrastructure and DevOps support, data collection and processing pipelines, system integrations, and maintenance for products we did not originally write. Support engagements are scoped monthly. If you need a broader operational IT function rather than an engineering team, IT outsourcing is the better starting point.
An offshore technology partner is only useful long-term if it can take over things it did not build. We inherit codebases regularly — the first two weeks go into an audit and a written risk list before anyone touches production.
How Delivery Actually Runs
The process is the product here, so it is worth being specific about.
Sprints of one or two weeks, chosen by project length rather than habit. Each one closes with a demo and a written progress document.
Standups daily or every other day, plus a written team status every day in Slack or whatever channel you prefer.
QA runs alongside development. A feature is tested when it is finished, not batched into a testing phase at the end. That is manual testing plus basic automated coverage.
Design runs in parallel too — two to three weeks, counted from the development start, not before it.
Our tracker holds your budget. We built our own system rather than running Jira. Functionally it does the same job, with one difference that matters: the client budget and project scope sit inside it, next to the tickets. You see spend against scope whenever you look, without asking.
What Projects Actually Cost
Three engagements from our delivery practice. Client names are withheld; the numbers are not.
3.5 months, one full-stack engineer. Scope grew because the product was defined while we were building it. No product owner on the client side meant every early assumption turned into a change request.
2 months, one designer and two engineers. Scope was defined before the start and we reused internal modules from earlier projects. Third-party integrations removed work we would otherwise have billed for.
One full-stack engineer. The client arrived with page structures, workflows and a database schema already written. There was nothing to guess at.
The pattern across all three is the same, and it has nothing to do with location: cost tracks how much ambiguity is in the project on day one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Dedicated engineers start at $20 an hour for backend or frontend, $22 for mobile, $24 for full-stack and $25 for data engineering. Project management is included. A four-person team running full time lands around $13,000–15,000 a month; a two-person team on a focused build sits near half that. Short project work is billed at $25–40 an hour.
Three to seven days from a signed contract, assuming the scope call already happened. The bottleneck is almost never our side — it is access provisioning and legal review on the client's.
You do, in full, and it is stated in the contract. Code, designs, documentation and data models transfer to you. We do not retain licences to anything we build for a client.
We backfill from a team of 50+ with an overlap period so context transfers rather than evaporates. This is the practical argument against hiring individual freelancers offshore: there is no bench behind them.
Delivery has held through the past several years for European and US clients. The operational answer is distribution — offices in more than one location, backup power and connectivity, and engineers spread across cities. Ask any vendor for their continuity setup in writing; we put ours in the contract.