Nearshore vs offshore Nearshore or offshore?
The right answer depends on your work.

The models differ mainly in distance. Not just in kilometres, but in timezone, language and way of working. That distance determines how much conversation is possible and how much you need to pin down up front.

• —Onshore: you work with an agency or developers in your own country. Shortest lines, same language, highest rates.
• —Nearshore: the team is in a nearby country with almost the same working day. For the Netherlands, think Eastern Europe, Portugal or Morocco.
• —Offshore: the team is far away, often in Asia, with a time difference of several hours. Lowest rates, but the least overlap in working hours.
• —Freelancers: individual developers, locally or remote. Flexible and quick to start, but you are responsible for direction, continuity and quality control.

On paper it's mostly about price. In practice it's about how quickly a question gets an answer. With nearshoring you ask a question at ten and have an answer by half past. With offshoring the answer sometimes arrives the next morning, after your team has already moved on with an assumption.

That doesn't make offshore bad. It means offshore works better the more precisely the work is specified. The more that still needs deciding during the build, the more that distance costs you.

Nearshore development in Morocco →

The hourly rate is the visible cost. The invisible costs sit in everything around it, and they don't show up in a quote.

• —Coordination: someone on your team has to write specifications, answer questions outside office hours and review work. Those hours count.
• —Waiting time: every question that sits overnight delays the work by a day. On a project full of small decisions, that adds up fast.
• —Rework: a misunderstood requirement surfaces at delivery, not in a five-minute conversation halfway through.
• —Changing teams: at large offshore vendors, team members sometimes rotate during a project, and knowledge leaves with them.

What software development costs →

To be fair: there are situations where offshore fits better than nearshore. Nearshore costs more than far offshore, and that difference isn't always worth paying.

Offshore works well for work that is clearly specified, needs little back-and-forth and can run asynchronously: maintenance on a stable system, well-scoped tasks with clear acceptance criteria, or support that needs to run outside European office hours. With a tight budget and a team used to working async, offshore can be the sensible choice.

Nearshore pays off mainly in product development: work where requirements still shift, where you want engineers to think along, and where fast feedback makes the difference.

Ask yourself these questions before comparing vendors. The answers usually point to a model on their own.

• —How well are the requirements defined? Many open questions point to nearshore or onshore.
• —Does the team need to join your stand-ups and sprints? Then you need overlapping working hours.
• —Who in your organisation has time to direct a remote team?
• —What data will the team process, and what does that mean for the GDPR?
• —How important is it to meet in person now and then?
• —Are you looking for a complete team, or extra capacity next to your own developers?

Outsourcing software development →Hiring developers in Morocco →

YouBar is a nearshore software agency in Temara, near Rabat. Morocco runs on GMT (UTC+0) all year: one hour behind the Netherlands in winter, two in summer. A direct flight from Amsterdam takes about 3.5 hours.

We fit best with companies building or growing a product that want senior engineers available during the Dutch working day. If you mainly need the lowest possible hourly rate for tightly scoped work, we'll tell you that honestly too.

Outsourcing app development →