Nearshoring Explained
Nearshoring – Finally, we get to Nearshoring. Nearshoring began as companies recognized the challenges with traditional offshoring, but also realized that many software products are not being built because companies cannot afford the standard prices of US-based devs.
The premise of nearshoring is: Let’s find a country that is in a similar timezone as the US with a highly educated and technical population and move our software development there.
Several of these countries include:
- Costa Rica
- Columbia
- Argentina
- Belize
- Nicaragua
Each of these companies brings unique strengths and weaknesses. Personally, we’ve worked with many developers based in Costa Rica and have loved the experience each time. Costa Rica has a high standard of living, is affordable, has amazing (college-educated!) talent, and most of the devs we’ve worked with a fluent in English. Many other Latin American countries offer similar benefits – with Columbia being our second favorite.
Nearshoring (when done well) provides these key benefits:
- Talented developers/designers/team members (the most important!)
- Teams in your timezone
- Teams that speak English (and are willing to participate on calls/planning)
- Reduced costs compared to US based developers
- Teams that can integrate seamlessly into your workflow (whether Agile, Waterfall, or something else)
In a nutshell, nearshoring is simply an attempt to capture the benefits of offshoring while mitigating the risks and keeping costs low. And in our experience, it is a great alternative to hiring expensive onshore dev teams. It is the Goldilocks of outsourcing. It tries to be “just right”. 😉
