- Dedicated development teams deliver better results than outsourcing, onshoring, or nearshoring by offering cost efficiency, access to larger talent pools, and long-term commitment.
- Companies save 25-40% per hire on average by building dedicated teams in India, with real examples showing savings of $1 million+ annually.
- Before hiring a dedicated development team, choose the right hiring and engagement model, pick a reliable partner, and evaluate proposals, prioritising those who deliver on cultural fit and local expertise.
If you’ve ever tried outsourcing, you know the story. Contractors promise speed and savings, but you end up with delays, substandard work, and costs that spiral out of control.
We see this quite often when talking with CTOs and VPs of Engineering. Many are moving away from outsourcing and hiring dedicated development teams through offshoring instead. And they are seeing tangible benefits along the way!
In this article, we’ll walk you through why dedicated teams deliver better results than other models, what you actually save when you build one, why India remains the top market for tech talent, and what to look for before you set up your new team.
We’ve drawn on 10+ years of experience building over 130 dedicated development teams for companies like yours to give you a clear, actionable guide.
Let’s start with the fundamentals.
Why your business needs a dedicated development team
Your business needs a dedicated development team for three main reasons:
- Access to specialised talent. Your existing team lacks specific skills and expertise, especially in in-demand and niche technologies such as data engineering and legacy systems that are hard to find at home.
- Cost-effectiveness. Wage inflation is forcing you to overspend to stay local, making it financially unsustainable to hire in markets like San Francisco, London, or Paris.
- Full commitment. You need engineers who are 100% dedicated to your organisation, not contractors splitting their attention across multiple clients with competing priorities.
Beyond these core drivers, dedicated teams are a good fit for your company if you want complete control over your team (without outsourcing constraints) or need better knowledge retention with engineers who stick around long enough to truly understand your business.
What do the right dedicated developers bring to your team?
What makes dedicated developers different isn’t just their technical expertise. Sure, they bring niche programming skills, but they’re also problem-solvers who contribute ideas, suggest improvements, and push back when something doesn’t make sense.
They’re so invested in your mission, vision, and goals that, over time, they stop being “the offshore team” and just become… your team.
Take Preqin, a UK FinTech that transitioned from traditional outsourcing to a dedicated development team that, eventually, scaled to a 450+ person R&D Centre in Bangalore.
The engineers they hired were 100% aligned with the company’s goals and pivotal in launching Preqin Pro, a flagship product that cemented the organisation’s status as a global leader in alternative asset insights.
Dedicated development team vs other models
When you’re looking to scale your tech team, you’ve got a few options, including outsourcing, onshoring, nearshoring, or building a dedicated development team. Each model delivers different outcomes in terms of cost, speed, and control:
- Outsourcing brings in temporary resources for specific tasks. You get flexibility, which is great if you just need extra hands for a few months. But integration is limited. Engineers come and go with each project phase, which means knowledge walks out the door when the contract ends.
- Onshoring means setting up teams locally. You get direct oversight of project execution, but you’ll still face the same old problem: competing in the same limited talent pool with inflated salaries that made scaling unsustainable in the first place.
- Nearshoring provides geographic proximity and time zone alignment, which can make collaboration smoother. However, you won’t find the same talent calibre, in both quantity and quality, or the same level of cost savings as building an offshore dedicated team in countries like India or the Philippines.
- Dedicated development teams (via offshoring) offer cost efficiency, full control, and long-term commitment. Engineers are integrated into your workflow and work exclusively for you. They report to you, follow your processes, and care about your product.
As Adith Khan, Director of Partner Success at The Scalers, explains: “When engineers report directly to the organisation rather than through a third-party vendor, collaboration becomes far more natural. This direct reporting structure eliminates the friction you get with traditional outsourcing models.”
What you actually save with a dedicated team
Cost is usually the first question tech leaders ask when considering hiring dedicated developers, so let’s get specific.
Building a dedicated development team in a popular offshore destination like India can dramatically reduce your costs compared to scaling your team in your home country. The median yearly salary for a software engineer in the US is $188,000, while an equivalent engineer in India earns $32,000!
As we reported in our guide on how much companies really save by offshoring to India, some of our partners have saved on average 25-40% per hire on total costs. Here are a few real examples:
- Nextpoint (US legal software company): Saves $1 million per year with its 13-person development team in Bangalore.
- Mediolanum (Dublin-based financial services firm): Saves $940,000 annually with its 16-person data team.
- Preqin (UK FinTech): Saved over £16.7 million a year after scaling to 450 employees in Bangalore.
The ROI compounds when you factor in reduced attrition, better knowledge retention, and the ability to scale without renegotiating contracts every quarter. Besides saving money, you’re building a sustainable foundation for growth.
Why India is the #1 market for dedicated developers
If you’re hiring dedicated developers, India should be at the top of your list. The country is home to one of the largest software development communities in the world, producing over 1.5 million engineers annually.
Cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad offer top-tier talent, English proficiency, and cost efficiency that’s hard to match anywhere else. Bangalore, known as the Silicon Valley of Asia, stands out as India’s top tech hub:
- ~2 million software developers live and work in the city.
- 90,000 new engineering graduates join Bangalore’s talent pool every year from local universities.
- 400+ R&D centres from multinational corporations like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft operate here.
The numbers are impressive, but what about the actual talent? Indian engineers bring strong technical skills and experience working with Western companies. They’re collaborative, adaptable, and used to working in distributed teams. Plus, their English proficiency is high, eliminating communication barriers you might face in other offshore markets.
One way to measure innovation and collaboration among developers is through GitHub activity. The platform reflects how engineers contribute to open-source projects, collaborate on code, and stay current with emerging technologies.
The illustration below shows the growth of the Indian GitHub community over the past year and future projections, highlighting India’s position as one of the fastest-growing developer ecosystems globally.
Key considerations before you hire a dedicated development team
Before you commit to building a dedicated team, take a step back and run through this checklist. A little planning up front can save you months of headaches down the line.
Choose the right hiring and engagement model
As we’ve covered in earlier sections, you can build or expand your tech team in many ways.
However, when it comes to hiring dedicated developers, the model that delivers the best results is offshoring. It’s ideal if you want to establish a dedicated development team that feels in-house, even with your engineers being thousands of miles from your headquarters.
Looking to hire full-stack developers, frontend specialists, Python developers, Java engineers, or React developers? Offshoring gives you access to those skills, and you can find professionals with specific industry experience, no matter if it’s a niche like legal tech.
Pick a reliable partner
Once you’ve decided on offshoring, picking the right partner makes or breaks your success. The best offshore development companies handle everything on the ground:
- Recruitment and candidate vetting.
- HR and administrative support.
- Payroll, taxation, and local registration.
- Office space and equipment setup.
- Daily engagement with your team.
Put simply, your partner does all the heavy lifting while you focus on your product and core business activities.
Besides verifying that your potential partner manages these tasks, assess their management capabilities, as these are crucial to a successful long-term partnership. Investigate who’s leading the business, the organisation’s structure and overall industry experience.
You might also consider evaluating the way they communicate. Just think about it: your team will be in a different time zone, so constant, fluent communication is a must when setting up a dedicated offshore team.
Lastly, examine their past performance and success stories. Ask for case studies and see if they’ve built dedicated development teams for companies similar to yours. Check their Clutch reviews, and speak with executives who’ve worked with them.
Evaluate proposals carefully
After meeting with potential offshore partners, you’ll start receiving proposals that outline a tailored approach to your needs. These may include a roadmap for setting up your team, along with key details such as the initial team size and the technologies involved.
Now, which offer to choose?
Look beyond team size and tech stack. Does this partner really understand the local talent pool? Do they offer informed opinions, suggest alternatives, or just say “yes” to everything?
Although your decision may rely on your organisation’s budget or business strategy, consider proposals from partners who go beyond just addressing your requirements. The best partners push back when your plan needs adjustment. They’ll tell you if your expectations are unrealistic, if your timeline is too aggressive, or if there’s a better way to structure the team. That honesty up front saves you time and money later.
Why hire dedicated developers with The Scalers
You’ve seen the numbers and know what to look for when hiring dedicated developers. Now you must find a partner who actually delivers.
At The Scalers, we’ve spent over a decade building dedicated development teams in Bangalore for companies across industries, including finance, manufacturing, and retail. We’ve set up teams that have grown from a few engineers to 100+ specialists. And we’ve learned what separates teams that succeed from those that struggle.
We hire from the top 2% of Indian tech talent in Bangalore – engineers who match your technical requirements and fit your company culture. That means you get professionals who integrate smoothly, contribute ideas, and stay long-term.
We had tried outsourcing but it always cost us more time and money to fix than it saved and increased tech debt. The Scalers are completely different. The engineers they found work the exact same as our local ones and they have created our culture there. We finally have a cost-effective way to scale.
Ready to hire dedicated developers and scale your team? Get in touch, and one of our senior executives will walk you through exactly how we can help.
FAQs
You retain full control over your dedicated development team. Engineers follow your processes, report to your managers, and work as an extension of your in-house organisation. We handle operations and admin so your leaders can focus entirely on delivery, quality, and alignment.
Yes. In tech hubs like Bangalore, you can hire specialists in any in-demand or niche technology, including AI/ML, data engineering, cloud-native, DevOps, and platform engineering. The depth of the talent pool ensures access to highly experienced engineers with exactly the capabilities you need.
If an engineer underperforms, our People & Culture team initiates a structured Performance Improvement Plan with clear goals over 30 days. If improvements aren’t met, we proceed with termination and already have replacement recruitment underway to avoid disruption. In severe cases, we can bypass the PIP and terminate immediately.
We hire engineers who not only meet your technical needs but also fit your culture, communication style, and ways of working. Our People & Culture team reinforces this through ongoing engagement. Over time, your offshore team adopts the same mindset and values as your local team.
Absolutely. One of the major benefits of offshoring is the ability to scale your team as your business grows. The flexibility you get when hiring a dedicated development team via offshoring is unmatched.
Your offshore team works in their local time zone, but we ensure a comfortable 3-4 hour overlap for real-time collaboration with Europe and the UK. This gives you both synchronous work time and extended development coverage. When your local team ends their day, progress continues, one of the most underrated advantages of offshoring.
Build Your Team,
Not Just a Contract
With The Scalers’ offshore dedicated development team, you get engineers who join your workflow for the long run. Grow steadily, stay flexible, and work with people who care about the product as much as you do.
