India
What it's actually like to hire a studio based in India.
The engineering question is settled — India has been building serious software for thirty years. The questions worth asking are about contracts, hours, money and how you tell the good ones apart. Here are honest answers, including the ones that don't flatter us.
Shark Labs is a software studio based in Bengaluru, India, working remotely with clients worldwide. Indian working hours overlap fully with Europe, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, and partially with the US east coast. Overseas clients are invoiced in their own currency with no Indian GST applied to exported services; Indian clients are invoiced in INR with GST as applicable. Clients own all intellectual property from the first commit, and work under either the client's own contract or a standard MSA governed by mutually agreed law.
- IST (UTC+5:30)
- Working hours
- 4.5–6 hrs
- Daily overlap with Europe
- No GST
- On services exported outside India
The timezone question, answered properly
This is the one that actually affects your week, and the honest answer differs a lot by where you are.
| Your location | Overlap | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| Europe / UK | 4.5–6 hours | Effectively a shared working day. Your morning is our afternoon. |
| Middle East | 6–7 hours | Near-total overlap. No adjustment needed. |
| Singapore / Australia | 3–5 hours | Our morning is your afternoon. Comfortable. |
| US east coast | 1.5–3 hours | One reliable window, usually your morning. Enough for a daily call. |
| US west coast | 0–1 hour | Realistically a handover rhythm, not a shared day. Some teams find that faster — you wake up to finished work. Some find it frustrating. Worth knowing which you are before you sign. |
Contracts and intellectual property
The concern behind this question is usually enforceability — what happens if something goes wrong and the supplier is eight thousand kilometres away. Practical answers:
- You own everything from the first commit. IP assignment is in the contract, and in practice it's structural: the code is in your repository and deploys to your accounts throughout. There is no moment where we hold it and hand it over.
- We'll sign your contract. Most clients have an MSA and we work under it, provided it doesn't include unlimited liability or an indefinite non-compete. Both are unreasonable to ask of a small studio, and we'll say so rather than sign and hope.
- Governing law is negotiable. English, Singaporean, Delaware or Indian law are all fine. For a project of this size, the governing-law clause matters far less than the milestone structure — a dispute over $8,000 is not going to court in any jurisdiction, and the real protection is that you've only ever paid for work already delivered.
- NDAs signed before discovery, on request, at no cost.
Money, GST and getting paid
Two different situations, and they're genuinely different.
If you're outside India
Services exported from India are zero-rated — no Indian GST is added to your invoice, and you have no Indian tax obligation. You're invoiced in USD, EUR or GBP and pay by international transfer or through a payment platform, whichever is cheaper for you. You may need to handle reverse-charge VAT or withholding under your own country's rules; your accountant will know, and India has double-taxation treaties with most major economies specifically so this isn't punitive.
If you're in India
You're invoiced in INR with GST applied as applicable, and it's a normal input credit. Payment by NEFT, RTGS or UPI. Nothing unusual.
The honest bit about pricing
A lot of the reason buyers look at India is cost, so it's worth being direct: yes, an Indian studio is usually cheaper than a comparable one in London or San Francisco, mostly because salaries and overheads are lower rather than because anything is being skipped.
But *cheapest* is the wrong thing to optimise for, and the market here has a wide floor. There are studios in India quoting a fifth of our prices, and the way that arithmetic works is fewer hours, juniors doing the work unsupervised, or a scope that quietly excludes testing, documentation and everything after launch.
Our prices are the same for Indian and overseas clients — the same published ranges, converted at the prevailing rate. There's no offshore discount and no Western premium. We came across both practices while researching this market and neither survives being written down.
How to tell a good Indian studio from a cheap one
This applies to any studio anywhere, but the variance here is wider, so the questions matter more. We surveyed twelve agencies while building this site and found live examples of every one of these failures.
- 01Ask who writes the code. If the person on the call isn't building it and can't tell you who is, you're buying a sales process. This is the single most predictive question.
- 02Ask for one live URL and open it. Run it through PageSpeed while you're on the call. A studio that builds well has something it's happy for you to inspect unannounced.
- 03Check whether they publish prices. Not a moral point — an unpriced quote is set by what you look able to pay, and that tells you what kind of relationship it is.
- 04Ask about after launch. Most studios have no answer. If maintenance is improvised after the invoice clears, it will be improvised badly.
- 05Look at the team page and the case studies. Stock photography, unnamed clients and percentage claims with no baseline are the standard tells. So is a services list with forty near-identical pages — we found agencies running thirty-plus 'hire an X developer' pages, which is a content strategy rather than a capability.
Why Bengaluru specifically
Nothing mystical. It's where the engineering depth is — the highest concentration of product companies, infrastructure teams and people who've operated systems at scale in the country — which matters when a project needs a specialist for two weeks. It's also the easiest place in India to sanity-check a technical decision against someone who has already made it.
It makes no difference to how we work with you. We're remote-first with clients everywhere; the location is context, not a service area.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask
Is it risky to hire a software studio in India?
The risk isn't geography, it's the same risk anywhere: an unclear scope, no visibility during the build, and no plan for after launch. Mitigate it the same way you would locally — a small paid first engagement, milestone payments so you never pay ahead of delivery, code in your own repository from day one, and infrastructure on your own accounts. Do that and the supplier's location stops being the variable that matters.
Will we pay GST on services from an Indian studio?
Not if you're outside India — services exported from India are zero-rated, so no Indian GST appears on your invoice and you have no Indian tax obligation. You may have reverse-charge VAT or withholding obligations under your own country's rules, which your accountant will handle. Indian clients are invoiced in INR with GST as applicable, claimable as a normal input credit.
How much cheaper is an Indian studio?
Typically 40–70% below an equivalent London or San Francisco studio, driven by salary and overhead differences rather than by anything being omitted. Be wary of quotes far below that band: at the very bottom of this market the saving comes from fewer hours, unsupervised juniors, or a scope that silently excludes testing, documentation and post-launch support.
Which law governs the contract?
Whatever we both agree — English, Singaporean, Delaware and Indian law are all workable, and we'll sign your MSA rather than insist on ours. Practically, for projects in the $3,000–25,000 range, the milestone structure protects you far more than the jurisdiction clause does, because you never pay for work you haven't received.
Can you work US hours?
We can shift a few hours to hold a reliable daily window with the US east coast, and that works well. Genuine west-coast overlap would mean working nights, which we won't pretend to do sustainably — a studio that promises it either won't deliver it or will burn out mid-project. If real-time west-coast collaboration is essential, hire closer to home; if a handover rhythm suits you, this works fine.
Next step
Ask the awkward questions on the first call.
Contracts, timezone, who writes the code, what happens after launch. We'd rather answer all of it up front than have it surface in week six.