Nearshore vs Offshore Development for US Companies

What nearshore and offshore actually mean for a US buyer

Offshore means a team far enough away that your working days barely touch: India, Pakistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Eastern Europe to a lesser degree. Nearshore means a team in a neighboring region with similar hours: Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and the rest of Latin America for a US company.

Tepia is often asked which is better. The honest answer is that the label matters less than three things: who leads the project, whether the engineers work your hours, and whether the people on your project are the people who were sold to you. Tepia’s model addresses each of those directly, and this page compares it alongside the two conventional options.

Time zone overlap, rates and communication compared

Overlap is measured against US Central time, which sits in the middle of the country’s working day.

Offshore rates look like a 50% to 70% saving per hour. In Tepia’s experience the saving shrinks quickly once you account for the extra hours spent writing specifications that cannot be discussed live, the rework from misunderstandings, and the internal staff time spent managing the relationship.

Where offshore and nearshore each win honestly

Tepia is not the right answer for every job and says so.

• Offshore is the right choice when the work is fully specified, low ambiguity and low interaction: regression testing, porting a stable codebase, staff augmentation for a team that already has strong leadership, or maintenance on a product with no roadmap. The rate difference is real and the overlap gap does not hurt much.
• Nearshore is the right choice when you have in house technical leadership and want to add capacity that can join your daily standup. A good nearshore partner in Mexico or Colombia delivers most of the collaboration benefit at a meaningful discount to US salaries.
• Tepia is the right choice when you do not have technical leadership to lend, when the product’s design and retention matter as much as its code, when you want one accountable US company holding the contract, and when you need the whole lifecycle from Discovery through Support rather than hours of engineering.

Participant Media’s Director of IT described working with Tepia this way: “If I could build an in-house team, it would be exactly like them.” That is the outcome Tepia’s model is built to produce: the collaboration of an internal team without the hiring.

How Tepia sources and runs a team in US hours

Tepia describes its approach as human intelligence: the right individual for the role rather than whoever is on the bench. Project management, design leadership and engineering leadership are US based, led by Brianna Martison as Director of Engineering and Fahad Baig as Technical Lead Manager, with Dustin Gordon directing operations. Engineers are sourced individually from a global pool, vetted on code quality, communication and availability during US working hours, and assigned to your project for its duration.

Every engagement has a named Tepia project manager who runs the schedule, the weekly demos and the issue log. Design and engineering leads review every deliverable before it reaches you. You are never handed off to a team you did not meet.

Tepia has offices and presence in Costa Mesa (Orange County), Tampa, Pittsburgh, Austin, Las Vegas and Kansas City, which means in person Discovery and Training sessions are practical for most US clients. For more on this model see nearshore app development in US time zones and app development outsourcing for US companies.

How Tepia approaches a nearshore style engagement

Tepia runs the same six phases regardless of where engineers sit, and each phase has a US based owner.

1. Discovery. System investigation, user interviews and third party integration review, often with in person sessions at one of Tepia’s offices or your site. Deliverables: Investigation Summary, Interview Summary, User Stories. Typically 1 to 3 months, shorter with a spec.
2. Design. Design questionnaire, moodboards, style guide, detailed wireframes and sample designs, led from the US and reviewed with you in live sessions during your working day.
3. Development and Testing. Alpha and Beta schedules with test plans for functional, user acceptance and non functional testing. Daily engineering work happens in US overlapping hours so blockers are resolved the same day.
4. Training. In person and remote hands on sessions built around user story scenarios.
5. Launch. Data migration, transition from the old system and Tepia support reps on the rollout.

Frequently asked questions