The day rate is a third of ours. Sometimes that's exactly the right trade. Here's how to tell — from people who rescue the projects where it wasn't.
For well-specified work with stable requirements — a defined API, a screen-by-screen build against finished designs, ongoing maintenance of a documented system — a good offshore team is excellent value, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. If you have strong internal technical leadership to write specs and review output, the rate arbitrage is real.
Enterprise AI work is not well-specified by nature: requirements emerge from your data, your edge cases, your compliance constraints. That's precisely where the offshore model struggles — every ambiguity becomes a ticket, every ticket a timezone-delayed round trip, and the £350/day rate turns into £900/day of effective cost once you count your own staff writing specifications, reviewing output and re-explaining context. The rescue projects we take on share a pattern: eighteen months in, 80% "done", and the hard 20% — integration, exceptions, security, performance — untouched because it was never in a ticket.
Our counter isn't rate, it's shape: senior architects who take ambiguity off your desk rather than returning it as questions, fixed pricing that makes the hard 20% our problem, weekly demos in your timezone, and AI-accelerated delivery that closes much of the raw rate gap anyway.
| 1Tech | Offshore agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Headline rate | Fixed price per outcome | Low day rate; hours multiply with ambiguity |
| Specification burden | We produce it — that's the job | Yours; quality of output tracks quality of tickets |
| Communication | UK/US/Gulf hours, senior people in the room | Timezone offset; layers between you and the coder |
| The hard 20% | Included in the fixed scope | Where projects stall — integrations, edge cases, security |
| Best for | Ambiguous, integration-heavy, compliance-adjacent builds | Well-specified builds with strong internal tech leadership |
Buy offshore capacity when you can write the spec. Buy accountable outcomes when you can't. Comparing other routes? See vs the Big-4 and vs hiring in-house.