Hire dedicated developers in India, from $1,500 a month
Qilin Lab is a software company in Bengaluru, India, with 35+ engineers. You hire dedicated developers in India through Qilin Lab on a month-to-month contract, from $1,500 per developer per month with $0 upfront. Hours are matched to your team. A matched shortlist takes about 48 hours; the developer starts in roughly a week. The first 3 days are a trial you pay for only if you continue. For companies, not job seekers.
We'll send a shortlist and pricing in about 48 hours.
What a software developer costs in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, next to a dedicated developer in India.
Pages like this one usually say "save 60 to 70 percent" and cite nothing. Below are the official pay figures instead, each with its date, and the arithmetic is written out so you can check it.
| Country | Figure, as published | What it measures, and when | Approx. US$ per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | $135,980 a year | Median annual wage of software developers, May 2025 (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook) | $11,330 |
| United Kingdom | £56,914 a year | Median gross annual pay, full-time "programmers and software development professionals" (SOC 2134), 2025 provisional (ONS ASHE Table 14.7a) | $6,410 |
| Canada | C$48.08 an hour | Median hourly wage of software developers (NOC 21232), reference period 2023-2024 (Job Bank, from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey). Annualised by us at 40 hours × 52 weeks, about C$100,000 | $6,010 |
| Australia | A$2,610.20 a week | Average weekly total cash earnings of "software and applications programmers" (ANZSCO 2613), all employees, May 2025. A mean, not a median (ABS Employee Earnings and Hours, data cube 11). Annualised by us at × 52, about A$135,700 | $8,110 |
| Qilin Lab, India | from $1,500 a month | Starting monthly rate for one full-time full-stack developer on contract. The final rate is confirmed on your shortlist | $1,500 |
The arithmetic of that table: $1,500 a month is $18,000 a year, about 13% of the US median, 23% of the UK figure, 25% of the Canadian one and 18% of the Australian one. Stated as a gap, one developer for one year comes to roughly $118,000 less than the US median, $59,000 less than the UK figure, $54,000 less than Canada's and $79,000 less than Australia's.
Four cautions before any of this goes into a budget.
- The rows are not like for like. The statistics cover every level of seniority in the occupation. The Qilin Lab row is a starting rate. A more senior engineer or a scarcer stack costs more: mobile starts at $1,600 and AI and ML engineers at $1,800.
- Salary understates what an employee costs. Across all US private-industry jobs, wages were 70.0% of employer compensation costs in June 2026 and benefits the other 30.0% (BLS, released 9 September 2026). UK employers pay 15% National Insurance on pay above £5,000 a year in 2026 to 2027. Recruiting fees, laptops and desks are extra. None of that is in the salary rows.
- We have not listed what our invoice includes. You pay one monthly rate per developer. Invoicing currency and tax treatment sit in the engagement contract, so price them from that document.
- Exchange rates move. The dollar column will go stale before the salary columns do.
There is no UAE row. We could not find an official UAE wage series for software developers, and we would rather leave a gap than quote a job-board estimate.
India Standard Time against your working day, hour by hour.
All of India keeps one clock: India Standard Time, UTC+5:30, with no daylight saving. The US, UK and New South Wales do change their clocks, so your gap to Bengaluru moves by an hour twice a year. The UAE does not. This table takes an ordinary 10:00 to 19:00 day in Bengaluru and shows where it falls on your clock.
| Your location | Gap to India | 10:00 to 19:00 IST on your clock | Shared with a 09:00 to 18:00 local day |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York (EDT) | India is 9 h 30 min ahead | 00:30 to 09:30 | 30 minutes, 09:00 to 09:30 |
| New York (EST) | India is 10 h 30 min ahead | 23:30 the night before to 08:30 | None |
| Los Angeles (PDT) | India is 12 h 30 min ahead | 21:30 the night before to 06:30 | None |
| Los Angeles (PST) | India is 13 h 30 min ahead | 20:30 the night before to 05:30 | None |
| London (BST) | India is 4 h 30 min ahead | 05:30 to 14:30 | 5 h 30 min, 09:00 to 14:30 |
| London (GMT) | India is 5 h 30 min ahead | 04:30 to 13:30 | 4 h 30 min, 09:00 to 13:30 |
| Dubai (GST) | India is 1 h 30 min ahead | 08:30 to 17:30 | 8 h 30 min, 09:00 to 17:30 |
| Sydney (AEST) | India is 4 h 30 min behind | 14:30 to 23:30 | 3 h 30 min, 14:30 to 18:00 |
| Sydney (AEDT) | India is 5 h 30 min behind | 15:30 to 00:30 | 2 h 30 min, 15:30 to 18:00 |
Read it plainly. For the Gulf, a normal Indian day is nearly your whole day. For the UK it is your morning and lunch. For Sydney it is your afternoon. For North America a normal Indian day gives you almost nothing live, so real overlap means the developer works evenings. Four shared hours with a New York morning, 09:00 to 13:00, run from 18:30 to 22:30 in Bengaluru in summer and from 19:30 to 23:30 in winter. The same four hours for Los Angeles run from 21:30 to 01:30 in summer and from 22:30 to 02:30 in winter. Our engineers have run the technology for Canco Petroleum's 200+ fuel stations in Canada from India for three years, across that gap.
What Qilin Lab commits to is this, and no more: developers are matched to overlap with your working hours. We do not publish a shift pattern, because the right hours depend on your team and on the person. Put the hours you need in your brief, confirm them with the developer when you interview, and have them written into the engagement contract.
One Indian company on the contract, not an individual.
Your contract and your invoice are with Qilin Software Lab Private Limited, which trades as Qilin Lab. You do not contract with the developer personally: the developer is employed by Qilin Lab, so there is no Indian payroll for you to run and no Indian employment contract in your name. If you want the person on your own payroll, you need an employer of record rather than us, and the four routes below set out the difference. Nothing here is legal advice. Take your own before you sign.
- The company. The operating office is in Hennur, Bengaluru, Karnataka, and the full address is on our terms page. The CEO is Aditya Agarwal.
- The developers. They work for Qilin Lab and are placed full-time on your work. You direct that work day to day. Qilin Lab vets the person before you meet them and replaces them if the fit is wrong.
- Intellectual property. Under our terms, once all fees due have been paid in full, Qilin Lab assigns to you the intellectual property rights in the bespoke deliverables you commissioned, excluding any Qilin Lab background IP embedded in them. Background IP means Qilin Lab's own tools, libraries, templates and know-how, together with improvements to them made during your engagement. For those you get a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual licence, limited to using them as incorporated in your deliverables and for your own internal business purposes. If you intend to resell or redistribute the deliverable, raise that before you sign. Until all fees are paid, the work product stays with Qilin Lab and is licensed to you for internal evaluation only. An executed statement of work or master services agreement can change these defaults, and where the two conflict the signed agreement prevails.
- Law and disputes. The governing law is India's. Disputes go to arbitration administered by the Mumbai Centre for International Arbitration (MCIA), seated in Bangalore, conducted in English before a sole arbitrator.
What this page cannot tell you: NDA wording, notice, invoicing currency and tax treatment. Read those in the engagement contract rather than on a web page, ours included. If your lawyers need a different governing law or forum, raise it before you sign.
How English is checked, and why a national average tells you little.
Every developer on a Qilin Lab shortlist has passed a live interview that covers spoken and written English as well as engineering. That interview follows a real coding assessment, and only people who clear both are shortlisted.
We test the individual because country-level numbers are a poor guide. The 2025 edition of EF's English Proficiency Index is built from the test results of 2.2 million adults in 123 countries and regions, and those adults are the general public, not software engineers, so it is background rather than evidence about anyone on your shortlist. It scores India at 484, 74th of those 123 countries and regions, against a global average of 488, and the city of Bengaluru at 569.
What matters on your project is narrower. Can this person explain a trade-off on a call? Can they write a pull-request description your team understands without a meeting? Do they say "I do not follow" early instead of guessing? Test all three yourself: interview the shortlisted developer with no account manager on the call, then use the trial days to read their written updates and the questions they ask about your tickets.
Five risks of hiring developers in India, and how to check any vendor, including us.
Offshore hiring fails in a small number of well-known ways. For each one, here is the question to put to a vendor and what Qilin Lab's own page commits to. Where we commit to nothing, we say so.
1. The engineer you interviewed is not the one who turns up, or leaves soon after
Ask: will the person I interview do the work, full-time, on my project alone? What happens if they resign? Our commitment: you interview the shortlist and pick the developer, and that developer is placed full-time on your work. There is a replacement guarantee if the fit is wrong. We publish no retention figure, so do not rely on one. The terms that apply if a developer leaves are in the engagement contract, and the month-to-month term limits what you can lose. Bengaluru's size cuts both ways here. There are enough experienced engineers in the city that a shortlist can reach you in about 48 hours, and enough employers chasing the same people that attrition is real. Location settles neither point. The interview and the trial do.
2. A junior engineer sold as a senior
Ask: can I run my own technical interview, on a problem taken from my codebase? Our commitment: a coding assessment and a live interview happen before anyone is shortlisted. Then you interview them yourself. Then a 3-day trial on your real work, which you pay for only if you continue. Three days is short, and competitors advertise longer: ValueCoders publishes a two-week risk-free trial and Toptal a trial of up to two weeks. Plan the trial so it counts: real tickets on day one, a code review on day two, a decision on day three.
3. Time-zone fatigue
Ask: which hours will this person keep, for how many months, and did they agree to it? Someone on permanent night hours gets tired, and tired engineers make mistakes. Our commitment: developers are matched to overlap with your working hours. Use the table above to ask for the shared hours you need and not more. A stand-up and a review window may be enough. Eight shared hours with California is a permanent night shift in India.
4. IP and data handling
Ask: who owns the code, and from what moment? Where does it live? Which security certificates does the vendor hold today? Our commitment: IP in bespoke deliverables is assigned to you on full payment, as set out in our terms. Qilin Lab does not hold a SOC 2 report or an ISO 27001 certificate today. If your procurement team requires one, say so at the start. Whoever you hire, keep the code in your own repositories and cloud accounts, grant access per person, and remove it the day the engagement ends. Our engineers built and run AllIndex's institutional platform including its infrastructure, so bring requirements like tenant isolation to the first call rather than the contract stage.
5. Bad news that arrives late
Ask: how will I hear that a task is stuck? Our commitment: English is screened before you meet anyone, and you talk to the developer directly. The rest is in your hands. Put the developer in your own stand-up, tracker and chat from the first day, and ask for a short written update at the end of each of their days.
Four ways to hire developers in India: direct hire, employer of record, freelancer or vendor.
A foreign company has four routes to an engineer in India. We sell only the last one, so here is when each of the others is the better choice.
| Route | Who employs the developer | Who finds and vets them | What you take on | Fits when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direct hire | You | You | Indian payroll, Indian employment law and whatever local set-up your advisers say that requires | You want a permanent team in India for years and have HR and legal support to run it |
| Employer of record (EOR) | The EOR on paper, while you direct the work | You | The salary plus the EOR's fee, on the EOR's terms | You have already found the person and only need a lawful way to employ them |
| Freelancer | Nobody. They are self-employed | You | A contract with one individual, and no cover if they stop | The work is short and well defined, and a gap of a week or two does no harm |
| Vendor, such as Qilin Lab | The vendor | The vendor first, then you at interview | A monthly rate per developer. With us that is month to month | You need a vetted engineer within weeks, full-time, for a project or a period, with one company accountable |
A vendor is the wrong route in three cases. If you plan to keep a large team in India for many years, price your own entity as well, because a vendor's margin sits inside every monthly rate. If you have already found a specific person, an EOR gets you that person and we cannot. If you want someone on your own payroll, this service does not provide that: the developers stay with Qilin Lab. Before employing anyone in India directly, take local legal and tax advice. How the vendor route works day to day, whoever you buy it from, is set out on our IT staff augmentation page.
If you are a developer looking for work, this page will not help you. Openings at Qilin Lab are listed on our careers page.
Work our Bengaluru engineers have shipped for clients abroad.
Qilin Lab built and ran these projects from India for clients in Canada, the United States and Singapore. They show delivery across borders and time zones. They were project engagements, not single-developer placements.
From brief to shipping, in about a week.
No sales maze. Tell us what you need and we do the matching — you only meet developers who already passed our bar.
Tell us what you need
Share your stack, the work, and how many developers. Two minutes is enough.
Get a shortlist
We match vetted developers to your brief and send a shortlist to review.
~48 hoursInterview & pick
Meet the shortlist, ask anything, and choose the engineer who fits.
Start risk-free
Begin with a 3-day trial. Keep them only if you're happy.
pay only if you continueOne monthly rate per developer.
Predictable, no upfront cost, and a fraction of hiring the same seniority locally. Final rate depends on seniority and stack — we confirm it on your shortlist.
Full-time, dedicated to your team, in your time zone.
- ✓ One senior, vetted engineer, full-time on your work
- ✓ Matched to your stack and time zone
- ✓ 3-day risk-free trial — pay only if you keep them
- ✓ Replacement guarantee if the fit isn't right
- ✓ Month-to-month — scale up or down anytime
Building a team?
Need several developers, or a lead plus a squad? We'll assemble a team and a blended rate that fits the roadmap.
- ✓ Multiple developers, coordinated as one team
- ✓ Optional tech lead to run delivery
- ✓ Volume pricing across the team
- ✓ One point of contact at Qilin
Before you hire developers in India.
How much does it cost to hire a dedicated developer in India?
Through Qilin Lab, from $1,500 per developer per month for a full-stack engineer, which is $18,000 a year. Mobile engineers start at $1,600 a month and AI/ML engineers at $1,800. The final rate depends on seniority and stack and is confirmed on your shortlist. There is nothing to pay upfront. For scale, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median annual wage of software developers at $135,980 in May 2025, and the cost table above adds the UK, Canadian and Australian figures.
How do the contract and IP ownership work when we hire developers in India through Qilin Lab?
You sign a services contract with Qilin Software Lab Private Limited, an Indian company, CIN U72900DL2019PTC357074. The developers are employed by Qilin Lab, not by you. Under our published terms, Qilin Lab assigns the intellectual property in your bespoke deliverables to you once all fees are paid in full, apart from Qilin Lab background tools and libraries embedded in them, which you licence perpetually and royalty-free for your internal business use. The governing law is Indian, and disputes go to MCIA arbitration seated in Bangalore, in English. NDA wording, notice and tax treatment are set out in the engagement contract.
How many hours will a developer in India overlap with my team?
A 10:00 to 19:00 day in India covers 08:30 to 17:30 in Dubai, 05:30 to 14:30 in London during British Summer Time, and 14:30 to 23:30 in Sydney on standard time, so the answer depends on where you are. That Indian day ends at 09:30 in New York in summer and before the day starts in Los Angeles, so live overlap with North America means evening work in India. Qilin Lab matches developers to overlap with your working hours, and the hours you ask for in your brief are the ones to have written into the contract.
How fast can a developer in India start on our project?
Your brief produces a matched shortlist in about 48 hours, and the developer is usually working with your team about a week later. For an offshore hire that week goes on three things: your own interviews, agreeing the overlap window the developer will keep against India Standard Time, and provisioning access to your repositories, cloud accounts and tracker. Choose the first ticket before day one. There is nothing to pay before the developer begins.
What if the developer does not work out?
In the first 3 days you stop and pay nothing. After that a replacement guarantee applies if the fit turns out to be wrong, and the contract runs month to month, so you are never tied in for a year. Three days is a short trial, so use it on real tickets from your backlog, not on a toy exercise.
Can I interview the developer before I commit?
Yes. You receive a shortlist with real profiles, you meet the developers, you ask whatever you want, and you choose. We recommend running your own technical interview on a problem from your codebase, and speaking to the developer directly so you can judge their English for yourself. Everyone on the shortlist has already passed a coding assessment and a live interview with us, but your interview is the one that decides.
Will the developer work only on my project?
Yes. Each developer is placed full-time and is dedicated to your team. They are not split between clients. You set the priorities and the backlog, and they work as a member of your team while remaining with Qilin Lab. If you need less than a full-time person, tell us in the brief, because the standard offer is one full-time engineer per monthly rate.
How is a dedicated developer in India different from hiring a freelancer?
A freelancer is self-employed and sells you their own time. You do the vetting, and if they stop, fall ill or take a better offer, the gap and the search are yours. A dedicated developer through Qilin Lab is employed by Qilin Lab, has already passed a coding assessment and a live interview before you see them, works on your backlog alone, and carries a replacement guarantee if the fit is wrong. You still interview and pick the person. For a short, well-defined job a freelancer is cheaper, because what we sell is a month of one engineer at a time.
What are the payment terms?
The public terms are simple: one monthly rate per developer, $0 upfront, and you pay for the trial days only if you continue. Everything else, including invoice dates, invoicing currency and payment method, is set out in the engagement contract you sign before the developer starts. Ask for that document early and read those clauses before the trial begins.
Sources
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers - median annual wage of software developers, $135,980, May 2025
- US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026 (released 9 September 2026)
- UK Office for National Statistics, ASHE Table 14: earnings by four-digit occupation, 2025 provisional (SOC 2134, Table 14.7a, full-time)
- GOV.UK, Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027 (employer National Insurance)
- Government of Canada Job Bank, wages for software developers (NOC 21232), reference period 2023-2024, updated 19 November 2025
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Employee Earnings and Hours, Australia, May 2025 (data cube 11, ANZSCO 2613), released 23 January 2026
- US Federal Reserve, Foreign Exchange Rates H.10, release of 14 September 2026
- IANA Time Zone Database, release 2026d (11 September 2026)
- NIST, Daylight Saving Time rules (US dates for 2026)
- GOV.UK, When do the clocks change? (UK dates for 2026)
- NSW Government, Daylight saving in NSW (2026 start date only; the April date follows the IANA rule)
- EF English Proficiency Index, 2025 edition: overview and method (2.2m adults, 123 countries and regions)
- EF English Proficiency Index, 2025 edition: India profile (national score 484, rank 74, Bengaluru 569)
- ValueCoders, Hire Developers: "2 weeks risk-free trial" (read 23 September 2026)
- Toptal, FAQ: "a trial period of up to two weeks" (read 23 September 2026)
Last updated · Qilin Software Lab Private Limited, Bengaluru, India
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