I run an offshore delivery centre, which means I have seen outsourcing from the side that most buyer's guides never visit. This is the version I would want an Australian buyer to read before signing anything, including with us.
Australian organisations outsourcing development are choosing between three shapes. Onshore outsourcing to an Australian consultancy costs the most and buys proximity, easy governance and local accountability. It makes sense for work entangled with stakeholders, compliance or sensitive data. Offshore outsourcing to countries such as Vietnam, the Philippines, India or Eastern Europe buys two to three times the capacity per dollar, and its success depends almost entirely on the management wrapper around the engineers. Hybrid delivery puts accountability and the senior roles onshore with build capacity offshore. Most sustained programmes end up here, because it prices like offshore and governs like onshore.
Ranges, not quotes, and the right comparison depends on how long you intend the arrangement to run.
For project work and short engagements, day rates are the honest lens. Onshore project delivery typically prices senior engineering effort in the order of $1,100 to $1,600 a day. Offshore engineers through a managed provider commonly land between $400 and $750 a day blended, depending on country, seniority and how much delivery management is included.
For long-term augmentation the day-rate comparison is the wrong one, because the real alternative to a multi-year offshore seat is not a local contractor but a permanent Australian hire. A senior engineer in Australia carries a fully loaded cost, salary plus superannuation, entitlements, payroll costs and overheads, that typically works out well north of $200,000 a year. An offshore engineer held long term through a managed provider annualises to somewhere between a third and two thirds of that, depending on seniority and the management wrapped around them. That is the comparison to run for seats you intend to keep filled for years, and it is a closer contest than the day rates suggest once you include the provider's management in the offshore figure and the hiring, retention and replacement costs in the local one.
At team scale, a dedicated offshore team of five to seven with a delivery manager typically runs at a monthly figure comparable to employing two or three senior engineers onshore. Whatever the shape, if a quote sits far below these bands, the missing money usually turns out to have been the management, the QA or the retention.
The country matters less than the operation, but it is not irrelevant. Vietnam, where our centre operates, combines a deep engineering talent pool, strong English in the professional tier, and a time difference with Australia of only two to four hours. Wage conditions there also keep teams together, which matters more than any brochure metric. The time-zone point is underrated in general. A team that shares most of your working day collaborates with you. A team twelve hours away exchanges memos with you.
Ask who owns recruitment. A partner recruiting engineers around your programme is selling a different product from one reallocating whoever is unassigned this month. Ask about attrition and what happens when someone leaves: replacement time, knowledge transfer, and who wears the cost. Ask where the code lives, who owns the IP, and what security controls the engineers actually work under, as opposed to what the brochure says. Ask to meet the engineers, not just the account manager. Ask what happens at the end, and whether the knowledge, or the team itself, can transition to you. A partner confident in its delivery answers all five without flinching. A body shop steers you back to the rate card.
For multi-year work we operate an Assemble, Operate and Transition model. We recruit the team around your programme, run it under our management and standards until it has proven itself, and then, where the client wants it, transition the team and its knowledge into their organisation. It exists because the traditional arrangement ages badly over years: the provider's incentive is to keep you dependent, and ours is to hand you something you could keep. The full write-up is here.
If you are weighing an outsourcing decision, the useful first conversation is about your programme rather than our brochure: what you are building, over what horizon, and what has to stay in Australia. Tell us what you're solving and you will get a straight read on which shape fits, from people who run the delivery rather than sell it.