Custom Software Development Company NYC

§ 01 · company snapshot

Who you would be hiring.

the short answer

Digital Heroes was founded in 2017 by Prasun Anand and is still run by him. By our own count it has 115 people, with staffed headquarters in New York and Delhi, and some of its team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. Your MSA names the Digital Heroes company you contract with.

Engineering is done from Delhi and Lucknow, with some mobile engineers in Sydney; the New York office holds leadership, US account directors and in-person kickoffs. Section 04 shows which of these facts you can check without contacting us, which is the test to put to any custom software development firm on your list.

who signs the contract: The Digital Heroes company named in your MSA. Check that name against the DUNS record in section 04 before you sign.
founded: 2017, by Prasun Anand, who still leads it as founder and CEO.
headquarters: New York: 1140 Broadway, Suite 704, NoMad. Delhi: B-24, Connaught Place. Both are staffed offices.
people: 115 across New York, Delhi, London, Lucknow and Sydney. Named profiles are on the team page.
registrations: DUNS No. 650878346 with Dun & Bradstreet. Tier 1 supplier status on UNGM, the procurement registry used by UN organisations.
track record: 2,000+ brands shipped in 40+ countries. Upwork Top Rated Plus, and public Trustpilot and Clutch profiles.

One contractual point is worth knowing before any call. Under our own terms, nothing said in a sales conversation, a deck or a proposal binds either side until it is written into a countersigned MSA or SOW. You can request the standard MSA early, at legal@digitalheroes.co.in, and reasonable amendments are negotiated before anyone signs.

§ 02 · engagement structure

How an engagement is put together.

A fixed-bid build starts the same way every time: a short call, then a paid discovery sprint that ends in either a fixed price or advice to buy instead. Teams and embedded engineers are bought differently. All six options are below.

01 · scoping call

Thirty minutes, free

No slides and no script. If the work suits us, a written scope and quote reach you within 48 hours. If it does not, you hear that on the call, with a pointer to someone better placed.
02 · discovery sprint

Two weeks, priced separately

Requirements workshops, a map of each system of record the build touches, a risk register and architecture decision records. It closes with a fixed bid for the build, or with a recommendation to buy a product that already exists.
03 · fixed-bid build

One price against one document

Quoted against the requirements discovery produced. An MVP usually takes 8 to 12 weeks; a production platform takes 16 to 28. Work outside the document needs a written change request that states its cost and its effect on the date.
04 · dedicated team

A squad on your roadmap

A lead, engineers and QA who own a slice of your product, billed monthly, normally for a quarter or more. Full detail sits on the dedicated development teams page.
05 · staff augmentation

Engineers inside your team

People who pass your interview and security checks, then work in your repository and attend your standups, typically inside two weeks. Your roadmap and rituals stay yours. See hiring software developers.
06 · retainer

Monthly, after launch

A named team for roadmap work, integrations and incident support once the system is live. The smallest retainer we staff is one senior engineer plus one designer.

What you receive, whichever model you choose

A written scope, so the agreement never depends on anyone's memory of a call.
Architecture decision records that explain why each significant choice was made.
Once build sprints start, a recorded demo of working code each week, with a note of what shipped and what slipped. A week without that demo is a week you are not invoiced for.
Release notes, and a CI/CD pipeline with automated tests and a way to roll back, in place before the first production release.
A handover pack: architecture documentation, operating runbooks and a session that transfers knowledge to whoever runs the system next.
Repositories and cloud accounts held in your name and paid for by you. Our engineers are added as collaborators you can remove.

Who owns what

Under the MSA, the code, designs, copy and custom assets made specifically for your project are assigned to you on full payment. We keep reusable libraries and tooling that existed before your project or were built for general reuse, and the right to show finished work in our portfolio unless you opt out in writing. If you need strict work-for-hire terms with no portfolio rights, that is written into the SOW and priced openly.

Custom Software Development Cost and Timeline

A focused first version of custom software typically costs $40,000 to $150,000, while complex enterprise platforms can cost $250,000 to $500,000 or more, depending on scope, integrations, security, and data migration. Delivery timelines also vary with complexity. Review our custom software development cost guide for detailed project ranges and budgeting factors.

On a fixed-bid build, your own price is set after discovery. The factors that move it are on our custom software cost drivers page.

§ 03 · the people

Who works on your build.

Most focused builds are staffed by three to five people. A tech lead, a designer and one or two developers form the core, and QA plus project communication are covered inside that small group, often part time. The number that predicts success is not the headcount: it is whether one senior engineer answers for the result and turns up on your calls.

Digital Heroes Delhi engineering team in their Connaught Place office — Part of the engineering team at the Delhi headquarters.

Digital Heroes offices, headcount, the work each office does, and its time zone
office	people	what happens there	time zone
New York HQ	20	Leadership, account directors, strategy, brand and growth. No engineers sit here.	ET
Delhi HQ	35	The engineering headquarters: web platform, backend, frontend, mobile, QA, DevOps and site reliability, plus operations and finance.	IST
Lucknow	22	Full-stack and web developers, project managers, QA and UI/UX design.	IST

Our staffed offices are in New York and Delhi, and engineers also work from Lucknow. Some of our team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there: in London, client services, strategy, UX research and design for UK and EU accounts; in Sydney, product, UX and mobile design, iOS and Android engineering, and APAC client services.

On hours: the New York office replies the same day between 9 AM and 6 PM Eastern, Monday to Friday. Engineering in Delhi and Lucknow works hours that face New York, and production emergencies are covered around the clock from Delhi and Sydney, with an after-hours message picked up inside one to two hours.

Engineering answers to our CTO, Divyansh Singh, who works from the Lucknow office and owns the architecture, the engineering standard and the technical calls on custom software builds. Delhi is the engineering headquarters, covering web platform, backend, mobile, QA and DevOps.

§ 04 · due diligence

Verify us before you sign.

A claim you cannot check is marketing. Every row below names who keeps the record and where to look. Where the record is our own page, the table says so, and you should weigh it accordingly. Run the same checks on every other firm on your shortlist. For a health build, our healthcare vendor checklist adds the BAA and patient data questions.

Each Digital Heroes claim, who holds the record, and how to check it
the claim	record held by	how to check it
A registered company, DUNS No. 650878346	Dun & Bradstreet	Run the number through the D&B DUNS lookup and compare the name with the party on your MSA, and ask which affiliate signs if they differ.
Tier 1 supplier on the UN Global Marketplace	United Nations Global Marketplace	Search the supplier registry at ungm.org.
Clutch: 5.0 from 66 verified reviews (checked 13 October 2026)	Clutch	Read each review on the Clutch profile. The rating may have changed since we checked it.
A public Trustpilot profile	Trustpilot	Read every dated review, the critical ones included, on the Trustpilot profile. We cannot edit or remove them.
Top Rated Plus on Upwork	Upwork	The profile belongs to our co-founder, Shreyansh Singh. The badge and job success score on his Upwork profile are computed by Upwork from paid contracts.
397 reviews across four Fiverr gigs from clients in 36 countries, captured 3 August 2026	Fiverr	The profile belongs to our co-founder, Shreyansh Singh. Every review is on his Fiverr profile, with the buyer's country and project size. The profile's own total is higher than our capture, which covered four gigs on one date.
115 people in New York, Delhi, Lucknow, London and Sydney	Our own team page	This is our record, not a third party's, so weigh it accordingly. Named profiles are on /team/.
The company grew out of a YouTube channel teaching ecommerce	YouTube	Watch the channel itself and its back catalogue.
A staffed office at 1140 Broadway, Suite 704	A street address	Hold your kickoff there. Details are on the New York office page.
Named client results	Our own case studies	Single-client case studies name the client with written consent, for example Emani and Noble Paris. Pages marked archetype are composites with illustrative names, so do not treat them as references. Our terms treat all results as illustrative, not as a promise for your project.
Anything a salesperson tells you	Your SOW	If it matters, ask for it as a clause with an acceptance criterion. Until then it binds nobody, and our terms say exactly that.

The same lookups, with a note on what each credential means, are collected on our credentials page.

§ 05 · vendor types

Against a freelancer, a body shop or a big consultancy.

Each kind of vendor is the right answer for somebody. The bottom row matters most, because it lists where each one goes wrong, ours included. These are our judgements from the work we see, not measured benchmarks.

How a freelancer, an offshore body shop, a large consultancy and Digital Heroes differ, including where each does not fit
Question	freelancer	offshore body shop	large consultancy	digital heroes
Who you talk to weekly	The person writing the code.	An account manager relaying to whoever is free on the bench.	A partner at the pitch, then a delivery manager and a changing team.	A senior tech lead who knows the code, plus a recorded demo every week.
What you are buying	One person's hours.	Hours from a pool, usually billed per head.	A programme, with governance, change management and on-site presence.	A fixed bid after discovery, or a monthly team with a named lead.
If a key person leaves	The work stops until you find someone new.	A replacement arrives; your context often does not.	Continuity holds, and you pay for the layers that provide it.	Decision records, runbooks and a repository in your account let the next engineer start from documents.
Best fit	One bounded job in a single discipline.	Tightly specified tickets reviewed by your own senior engineers.	Multi-year transformation with a large bench and heavy procurement.	A defined build or roadmap needing engineering and design owned end to end, with Eastern Time overlap.
Does not fit	Projects needing backend, design, QA and delivery management in parallel.	Buyers with no engineer of their own to check the output.	Budgets where the overhead would outweigh the build.	Scopes below one senior engineer plus one designer, ideas without validated demand, or teams that need every engineer in a US office.

Most of our engineers work in India, so on a map we look like an offshore vendor. The test we would ask you to apply is not geography. It is whether one accountable lead owns your build, whether working software is shown to you weekly, and whether the code lives in accounts you control. Hold us and every other shortlisted firm to those three. Our comparison of offshore software firms sets eight side by side.

Still building the shortlist? Two guides written by our team cover the selection process itself: how to choose a software development company and choosing a custom software firm without getting burned. For named firms rather than a method, see the nine custom software development companies in the USA we scored, us included.

§ 06 · scope

What we build.

This page is about the company. The work itself is described on the pages below, one per kind of system.

§ 07 · recent work

Three custom software builds.

Each project is shown with the client's permission. None of the three has a published results figure, so none is given here: each card says what the client needed, what we delivered and the technology involved.

clinics and hospitals · 2026

Planivo, workforce planning

the need: Clinics and hospitals needed one system to plan staff shifts and approve leave across several facilities, without two people of the same speciality away at once.
what we delivered: The whole platform, the signed-in app and its website: monthly shift rosters, vacation requests through three levels of approval with a speciality conflict check, tasks, training sessions with attendance, certification expiry reminders and screens showing who is on duty.
access and records: Six roles, each limited to its own part of the organization, and an audit history of every change.

planivo.me

web to print, South Africa · 2026

SpeedyPrint, an online print store

the need: Customers buying labels, race numbers, stamps and trophies needed to design them online, including runs where every item carries a different name or number.
what we delivered: A browser design editor, CSV variable-data print jobs, proofs and production files with an order status history, and an admin panel for orders, products, templates and users with three roles: customer, admin and production staff.
technology and integrations: Next.js 15, React, TypeScript and Supabase, with PayFast checkout and its payment webhooks, and transactional email.

sports training marketplace, USA and Canada

AirTrainr, athletes and trainers

the need: Athletes needed to find verified sports trainers and book sessions, and trainers needed one place for their schedule, offers and earnings.
what we delivered: The athlete and trainer mobile apps. Athletes search for trainers, book sessions and answer offers; trainers manage their schedule, send offers and follow their earnings and reviews. Both sides share chat and notifications.
technology and integrations: React Native with Expo, on a Supabase backend.

airtrainr.com

§ 08 · new york

Hiring from New York, stated plainly.

If you want a custom software development company with New York headquarters, here is exactly what that means with us. The company is headquartered at 1140 Broadway, Suite 704, in NoMad, and that is where our leadership and US account directors sit. Your code is not written there. The 20 people in the New York office cover leadership, account direction, strategy, brand and growth; the engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, and some of our mobile engineers sit in Sydney.

We spell that out because implying a Manhattan engineering floor would be exactly the kind of claim this page asks you to test.

What a New York client does get is real: kickoffs, design reviews and launch-week sessions in person at NoMad or at your office, with no travel line on the quote; a team on Eastern Time that answers the same day on weekdays; and emergency cover from Delhi and Sydney outside those hours. For US-anchored engagements the MSA typically defaults to New York law and a New York venue.

Visit the New York office page for the address, hours and how in-person sessions work, or compare us with the ten software development companies in New York we ranked, ourselves first.

§ 09 · honest limits

When to hire someone else.

Saying no early is cheaper for both sides than a project that should never have started. These are the situations where we will tell you to look elsewhere.

The scope is smaller than our floor.
We do not staff work below one senior engineer plus one designer, because the arithmetic fails for both parties. On the call we will suggest a freelancer or a smaller agency instead.
Nobody has shown they want the product yet.
A pre-revenue concept without validated demand should be tested more cheaply than a custom build. We will say that during the first conversation.
A product you can buy already does the job.
Plenty of requests are better served by configuring software that exists. Discovery is designed to reach that verdict when it is the true one, and we will name the tool.
Every engineer must be in the United States.
Our engineers are in India and Australia. If your contract, security policy or preference requires US-based engineers, we are the wrong firm.
You want a very large bench from week one.
A programme that needs several dozen engineers from the first week is what large consultancies are built for, and a better match for them than for a 115-person company.
You want the spec built with no questions asked.
We push back on requirements that will cost you later. If you would rather a vendor typed exactly what the ticket says, a cheaper shop will suit you better.

§ 10 · the first month

Your first 30 days.

This is how the opening month runs on a fixed-bid build. By day 30 you should hold a written scope, the architecture records, a fixed price or a documented reason not to build, and, if the build has started, your first recorded demo.

before day 1
The call

Calls are booked at least five days out so the discovery lead can read your current product, the repository if you share it, and your documents first. A same-week slot is possible on request. The written scope and quote follow within 48 hours of the call.
days 1 to 14
Discovery

Requirements workshops, the system map, the risk register and the first architecture decision records. Security starts here too: a threat model, a data-flow diagram and a review of how secrets are handled all land inside these two weeks. New York clients get an in-person kickoff at NoMad or at their office.
around day 14
The decision

You receive a fixed bid for the build against the written scope, or a recommendation to buy instead. Because discovery is priced on its own, you can stop here with the documents in hand, without having committed the build budget.
days 15 to 30
First sprints

Sprints run one to two weeks, and the first recorded demo of working code arrives at the end of the first build sprint, with its shipped and slipped note. The work is delivered into repositories and cloud accounts held in your name, on your billing.

§ 11 · questions

Questions buyers ask about the company.

Which legal entity signs our contract?

The one named in the MSA itself. Our terms define Digital Heroes as the legal entity operating under DUNS No. 650878346 and its affiliates that share that registration.

Ask which entity will sign before the draft reaches you, and check that name against the DUNS record before you sign. US-anchored engagements typically default to New York law and venue, and alternatives such as Delaware, England and Wales, Singapore, or JAMS or LCIA arbitration can be negotiated.

What does the IP clause actually assign to us?

On full payment, the default assignment covers everything made specifically for your project: the code, the designs, the copy and any custom assets we commission. We keep components, libraries and toolchains that existed before your project or were built for reuse across clients, anonymised aggregate metrics, and our internal methods.

We may also show finished work in our portfolio unless you opt out in writing. If you need full work-for-hire treatment with no portfolio rights, the SOW can say so and the price will reflect it.

Where will the engineers on our build be based?

In Delhi and Lucknow, working hours that face New York, with iOS and Android engineers also in Sydney. Nobody on the engineering side is in the New York office, which holds leadership, account directors, strategy, brand and growth. The table in section 03 lists every office with its headcount and time zone.

Can we read your MSA before we commit to anything?

Yes. Ask your contact for the current standard MSA, or email legal@digitalheroes.co.in. Reasonable amendments are negotiated before signing; after signing, changes need a written change order. We do not accept purchase-order terms that conflict with the MSA unless an authorised officer acknowledges them in writing, so raise any procurement terms early.

What is the smallest engagement you accept?

For ongoing work, one senior engineer plus one designer on a monthly retainer. Scoped builds are fixed-bid, with the typical durations shown in section 02. If what you need is smaller than that, you will hear it during the first call, along with a suggestion to use a freelancer or a smaller agency instead of stretching a team to fit.

What if discovery concludes we should not build at all?

Then that is the recommendation you get, with the tool named. Discovery is priced as its own piece of work so that you can act on a buy verdict without having committed the build budget. You keep the written scope and the system map either way.

Who responds if production fails outside New York hours?

Our Delhi office and our team members who work remotely from Sydney. Between them they cover production emergencies at any hour. An after-hours message is picked up within one to two hours whatever the clock says. Inside business hours, the New York team replies the same day, 9 AM to 6 PM Eastern, Monday to Friday.

Are the results in your case studies a promise for our project?

No, and our terms say so. Figures in case studies and on service pages describe what happened in specific situations. The only commitments that bind us are the ones written into an executed SOW with an acceptance criterion attached. If an outcome matters to you, put it there.

Is custom software a core practice or a side line for you?

We also run Shopify, brand and growth practices, so it is a fair question. Custom software sits with the engineering organisation, which answers to our CTO, Divyansh Singh. He owns the architecture, the engineering standard and the technical calls on custom software, SaaS and commerce builds. Most of the engineers work from the Delhi engineering headquarters and the Lucknow office.

Last reviewed 19 October 2026.

§ · keep reading

Guides for the buying decision.

Discuss Your Custom Software Project

Share your business requirements, current systems, and intended outcome. We'll discuss project scope, delivery options, and the information needed to prepare a proposal. If the work suits us, a written scope and quote follow within 48 hours of the call.

Book a call

Why work with Digital Heroes

115 people in New York, Delhi, Lucknow, London and Sydney, shipping ecommerce, web, software and mobile work for founder-led brands. Senior engineers only, no account-manager relay, and the same team from kickoff to launch.

Shopify Select Partner, as listed in the Shopify Partner Directory
Tier 1 registered supplier on the United Nations Global Marketplace, which requires audited company documentation
Top Rated Plus on Upwork, the bracket for the top 3% of talent by client outcomes
397 public five-star-weighted reviews across four Fiverr gigs, from clients in 36 countries
DUNS verified business, No. 650878346, so procurement can check us before signing
Listed by Clutch in Top 1000 Global B2B Companies and Top Web Designers 2024
Verified profiles on GoodFirms, DesignRush, Digital.com, AppFutura and TopDevelopers
2,000+ brands built across 40+ countries, with $50M+ in client revenue scaled

Book a call

More from Divyansh.

Chief Technology Officer · Lucknow · 57 posts on the site

service

Who you would be hiring.

How an engagement is put together.

Thirty minutes, free

Two weeks, priced separately

One price against one document

A squad on your roadmap

Engineers inside your team

Monthly, after launch

What you receive, whichever model you choose

Who owns what

Custom Software Development Cost and Timeline

Who works on your build.

Verify us before you sign.

Against a freelancer, a body shop or a big consultancy.

What we build.

Three custom software builds.

Planivo, workforce planning

SpeedyPrint, an online print store

AirTrainr, athletes and trainers

Hiring from New York, stated plainly.

When to hire someone else.

The scope is smaller than our floor.

Nobody has shown they want the product yet.

A product you can buy already does the job.

Every engineer must be in the United States.

You want a very large bench from week one.

You want the spec built with no questions asked.

Your first 30 days.

The call

Discovery

The decision

First sprints

Questions buyers ask about the company.

Guides for the buying decision.

Discuss Your Custom Software Project

Why work with Digital Heroes

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