Your next engineering office, open in four months.

AphraDev builds offshore development offices for funded startups: the legal entity, the office, and your first 5-15 engineers at $30-70K each instead of $160-200K. Not contractors, not outsourcing: you own the entity and employ the team. We set it up with you, on the ground. Your engineers there use the same tooling and work to the same review bar as your US team.

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Stop choosing between growth and runway.

Every funded startup hits the same wall: the roadmap needs more engineers than the runway can carry. An offshore office you own changes the arithmetic without changing your standards.

Line item	US-only hiring	With an offshore office
Cost per engineer	$160,000-200,000	$30,000-70,000
Talent pool	Fierce competition for domestic talent	Global pools: Poland, Mexico, India, Philippines & more
Runway	Closing fast, forcing tough decisions	Typically 12+ months longer
Growth vs. profitability	Pick one	Scale engineering while controlling costs

Worked example
A typical 15-engineer team costs $2.0M/year in the US. The same team in an office you own offshore: about $750K/year. The savings start the day they're hired.

Use AI aggressively. You'll still need engineers.

Every CTO asks us this now, usually about four minutes into the first call. AI has made a real difference to how much one engineer can ship, and we'd tell you to spend whatever it takes on the tooling. But the same multiplier lands on a $50K engineer and a $190K engineer, and someone still has to read the output and put their name on it. Those two facts are why the arithmetic above holds up better than people expect.

The multiplier applies to both teams

If AI makes an engineer 40% more productive, it does the same for the engineer who costs $50K. Output per dollar is the comparison that decides your budget, and running the same multiplier through both sides of it leaves the offshore team further ahead than it started.

Review became the bottleneck

Generated code still gets read, integrated, tested, deployed, and carried on-call. Every team we work with has more code in flight than it did two years ago and roughly the same number of people qualified to approve any of it, which is a hiring problem rather than a tooling one.

Your roadmap will absorb the gains

We have yet to meet an engineering org that answered higher throughput by shipping the same roadmap with fewer people. They shipped the backlog they'd been deferring for two years instead, and then found more backlog. Cheaper features tend to produce more features rather than a smaller team.

The old objections to offshore aged badly

Two things used to make distributed teams expensive: ramp time on an unfamiliar codebase, and the friction of writing carefully across a language gap. Those happen to be the two things current tooling handles best. A strong engineer in Warsaw or Cebu reaches a first merged PR faster today than one in San Francisco did five years ago.

Nobody pages a model at 3am

Someone has to own the production system and still be around in eighteen months with its history in their head. An office you own is how you keep those people long enough for the context to compound. It also buys you an on-call rotation where overnight incidents land in somebody's afternoon.

Cheap seats are easier to keep

Suppose we're wrong and you need eight engineers next year instead of fifteen. Eight you can carry through a slow quarter is a better position than eight you have to lay off when the next round takes longer than planned. Low cost per seat protects you on the way down too.

Worked example
Give both teams the same tooling and the same license budget, because that bill is a rounding error on either line. Six US engineers at $190K cost $1.14M/year. Fifteen offshore engineers at $50K cost $750K/year. You are still choosing between six people and fifteen.

One route, four fares.

Every engagement runs the same route: assess, implement, optimize. Board where it suits you: strategic guidance only, expert direction while your team executes, or a turnkey office we build end to end.

Discovery & Strategy

Find out if offshore is right for you, before you commit.

Readiness assessment, location deep dives, half-day leadership strategy workshops, and a go/no-go decision framework. 2-3 weeks.

from $7,500 Credits 100% toward implementation

Guided Implementation

Expert direction, your execution. You keep ownership of every step.

Playbooks & project plan, weekly guidance calls, vetted legal and vendor referrals, hiring frameworks, cultural integration, and 60-day post-launch support. 16-24 weeks, depending on how fast your team can move.

$25,000-50,000 cut 6-9 months off self-managed

Full Implementation

Turnkey offshore office, zero learning curve. Engineers productive in week one.

Everything, done for you: legal entity setup, office and infrastructure, recruiting and hiring your first 5-15 engineers, onboarding and cultural integration, 3-5 site visits, and 90-day post-launch support. 14-16 weeks.

$75,000-150,000 + results-based incentive

Ongoing Optimization

Sustain performance and scale with confidence to 50+ engineers.

Continuous recruiting pipeline, local HR and compliance, performance optimization, leadership development, quarterly site visits, and expansion support. Monthly.

$8,000-15,000 per month

Full implementation: typical 16-week schedule

Foundation & planning readiness, locations, project plan

Legal & entity setup entity, tax, employment agreements

Infrastructure & operations office, IT, HR systems, benefits

Hiring & integration recruiting your first 5-15 engineers

Handoff & optimization leadership coaching, 90-day support

Those bars overlap on purpose. Sourcing starts while the entity is still being filed, because in most jurisdictions the filing isn't what holds up hiring. Run these five tracks one after another and you get the nine-to-eighteen-month version instead.

Two ways companies fly with us.

Ready to scale

You raised a Series A or B and need to triple engineering capacity without burning the round in 18 months.

70engineers on one roadmap: 30 US plus 40 offshore
+133%more capacity for roughly 30% more spend
2-3xmore features shipped per quarter, so milestones come faster
12+ moadditional runway before you need to raise again

Extend your runway

Business is stable, but you need more time to hit the next milestone. Bridge rounds mean dilution; a smaller team slows you down.

40engineers total: 30 US plus 10 offshore who replace planned US hires
-30%engineering cost vs. an all-US team
Upvelocity maintained or increased, with no layoffs
$0dilution: reach profitability without a bridge round

Built by founders who've done this. A lot.

Fifteen-plus years building distributed teams across Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America, for our own startups and for companies like Meta, LinkedIn, and Pokemon Go. We've scratch-built offices on three continents. We know exactly what works, and we'll tell you when it won't.

Andrew

Engineering

Fifteen years of engineering leadership as CTO at multiple Bay Area startups, with roles at Meta and infrastructure launches including Pokemon Go. He has personally hired hundreds of engineers and shipped systems that handled billions of requests.

Amber

Operations & Legal

Fifteen years across engineering, operations, and law. Scaled a 100+ person distributed team from startup to $3M ARR in one year. She handles the entity setup, compliance, and people operations that make an offshore office actually work.

An engineering-first team out of Meta, LinkedIn, Pokemon Go, and One Medical. We understand tech stacks, hiring bars, and remote development workflows.

They handled everything. Six months later, we had 12 engineers in Poland producing the same quality as our SF team.

Michael R., CTO, e-commerce platform (Series A)

We extended our runway by 18 months without laying anyone off. The offshore team integrated seamlessly with our US engineers.

Sarah K., VP Engineering, B2B SaaS (Series B)

The readiness assessment alone was worth 10x the cost. It saved us from making expensive mistakes.

Kevin P., CEO, developer-tools startup

Why technology leaders choose AphraDev

Your office, your employees

Not contractors, and not outsourcing. You own the entity and employ the engineers directly, so the team belongs to you from the start.

Multi-region expertise

Offices opened on three continents. Objective advice, not a sales pitch for a premade solution.

Legal & compliance handled

Entity setup, employment law, IP protection, and tax compliance, done right the first time.

Engineering first

Operated by engineers from Meta, LinkedIn, Pokemon Go, and One Medical. We speak tech stack and hiring bar.

Onboarding built for current tooling

New hires learn your stack and how you expect AI-assisted work to be reviewed before it lands. Get that wrong once and you get volume instead of progress.

Transparent pricing

Fixed-fee services with no hidden costs, so the numbers are clear before you commit.

Career paths for your US team

Your senior US engineers move into technical leadership and mentoring roles, which is often what keeps them from leaving. Clients typically cut senior attrition by about 40%.

24/7 operations

Distribute on-call globally. Overnight incidents land in someone's daytime, which means less burnout and faster response.

Process excellence

Documentation and onboarding improvements that benefit every future hire, not just the offshore team.

Straight answers

How long does it take to set up an offshore office?

From decision to operating office: 3-4 months. From kickoff to your first engineer on payroll: about 10 weeks. Self-managed, the same journey typically takes 9-18 months. Most of that difference is sequencing rather than speed. We run legal, infrastructure, and recruiting in parallel because we already know which steps block the next one in each jurisdiction, and which ones only feel like they should.

What locations do you recommend?

We're location-agnostic. Depending on your time-zone needs, budget, and hiring profile, we typically evaluate Poland, Romania, Argentina, Mexico, India, Vietnam, and the Philippines, and we'll tell you when a location doesn't fit.

How much do offshore engineers really cost?

$30,000-70,000 fully loaded in Asia, Latin America, or Eastern Europe, versus $160,000-200,000 for comparable US engineers. We benchmark compensation by skill set for each location during Discovery.

Why not just hire contractors?

Contractors optimize for billable hours, not your roadmap. An office you own gives you employees who are invested in your product, a consistent quality bar, IP protection, and a team that compounds knowledge instead of rotating it away.

Why not just use AI instead of hiring more engineers?

Do both. That's what our clients do. AI raises output per engineer, which makes the cost of each engineer matter more, not less: the same multiplier on a $50K seat and a $190K seat returns very different numbers. And the work AI creates, the review and integration and on-call and migrations, still needs someone accountable for it. If AI really does remove your need for the next ten hires, we'll tell you that during Discovery instead of selling you an office.

What if we've never managed a distributed team?

That's what Guided and Full Implementation are for: proven playbooks, communication protocols, and manager training. Your team learns to run a distributed operation while we set it up.

What happens after setup?

The office is yours: entity, employees, everything. Most clients keep us on for Ongoing Optimization (recruiting pipeline, local HR, scaling guidance), but there's no lock-in.

Start with a free assessment.

Not sure offshore is right for you? Book a 30-minute call. We'll give you a straight answer, even if that answer is that offshore isn't right for you yet. You'll be talking to the people who have actually built these offices, not a sales rep.

Book your 30-minute call sales@aphradev.com