With us, custom software development in India means engineers at our Delhi headquarters and in Lucknow, with the account, the kickoff and same-day answers handled from New York. This page covers what an Indian build changes for a US buyer: the hours, the holidays, the rates, the IP clause and the data law.
Your software is engineered at our Delhi headquarters and Lucknow office, and the client side runs from New York: the account directors, in-person kickoffs for New York clients, and same-day answers on weekdays, 9 AM to 6 PM Eastern. We are registered in both countries, and your MSA names the entity you sign with. For a focused first version, expect $40,000 to $150,000, and the code lives in repositories you own from the first sprint.
Buyers in the US often picture an offshore build as a ticket thrown over a wall. Ours splits the other way: the code, the tests and the servers are handled in India, and the parts of the job that need a US business day stay in New York. The table names the place for each piece of work and what you hold once it is done.
| Part of the work | Handled from | What reaches you |
|---|---|---|
| The contract | Either registered company: the Indian one, whose registered office is in Connaught Place, New Delhi, or the US LLC | An MSA naming the signing entity, normally under New York law for a US client |
| Kickoff, design reviews, launch week | New York, at NoMad or at your office | In-person sessions for New York clients, without a travel charge on the quote |
| The account, day to day | New York account directors | Same-day answers on weekdays, inside New York office hours |
| Architecture | Our CTO, from the Lucknow office | Sign-off before any engineer starts, and decision records that explain each major choice |
| Web, backend, frontend and mobile code | The Delhi headquarters and Lucknow; some mobile engineers in Sydney | Working code in your own repositories, shown in a recorded demo each week once build sprints start |
| UI and UX design | Lucknow, with product and mobile design in Sydney | Agreed screens for every user role before coding starts |
| Testing | QA in Delhi and Lucknow | Builds that were tested before you open a preview |
| DevOps and site reliability | Delhi | Automated tests in a CI/CD pipeline and a tested rollback, ready before the first release to production |
| A production fault at night | Delhi and Sydney, between them around the clock | An after-hours message reaches a person within one to two hours |
By our own count the company has 115 people in five offices: Delhi, Lucknow, New York, London and Sydney. Delhi, the engineering headquarters, holds 35 across backend, frontend, mobile, the web platform, QA, DevOps and site reliability, and it also houses operations and finance. Lucknow holds 22, among them project managers, QA, UI and UX designers, and full-stack and web developers. The 20 people in New York write no code; they run leadership, client accounts, strategy, brand and growth.
Those headcounts are our own record, not an auditor's, so weigh them that way; the team page carries named profiles. Each office also has a page of its own: Delhi, Lucknow, New York, London and Sydney.
India runs on one clock, UTC plus five and a half hours, and does not observe daylight saving time. US clocks spring forward on the second Sunday in March and fall back on the first Sunday in November, by NIST's summary of the rule. So the gap to Delhi is a calendar fact, not a constant. The next change is on 1 November 2026, when New York falls ten and a half hours behind Delhi.
| US zone | 1 Jan to 13 Mar 2027 | 14 Mar to 6 Nov 2027 | 7 Nov to 31 Dec 2027 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eastern: New York | 10 h 30 min | 9 h 30 min | 10 h 30 min |
| Central: Chicago | 11 h 30 min | 10 h 30 min | 11 h 30 min |
| Mountain: Denver | 12 h 30 min | 11 h 30 min | 12 h 30 min |
| Arizona, outside the Navajo Nation | 12 h 30 min all year, because Arizona keeps standard time | ||
| Pacific: Los Angeles | 13 h 30 min | 12 h 30 min | 13 h 30 min |
| Hawaii | 15 h 30 min all year | ||
Read the Eastern row against a normal working day and the problem is plain: when New York opens at 9 AM in summer, it is 6:30 PM in Delhi. Two ordinary office days in the two cities do not touch. Any overlap you get is something the vendor chooses to staff, which is why it belongs in writing, zone by zone, and not in a sales deck.
Here is what we staff. New York answers on weekdays from 9 AM to 6 PM Eastern, and the engineers in Delhi and Lucknow keep hours that face New York. A fault in production is covered at any hour, between Delhi and Sydney. How the sprints use those shared hours, from planning to the recorded weekly demo, is set out on our page for an agile offshore software development company.
For your own cities, the free time zone planner lines up everyone's local time on one slider.
Time zones get the attention, but holidays are where working days quietly disappear. The cleanest public reference on the Indian side is the government's own list for its offices in Delhi: the Department of Personnel and Training issued the 2027 list on 16 July 2026. Below, its weekday closures sit beside the federal holidays that fall in 2027 on the schedules of the US Office of Personnel Management.
| 2027 | Delhi, central government offices | United States, federal |
|---|---|---|
| January | Tue 26, Republic Day | Fri 1, New Year's Day; Mon 18, Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. |
| February | None | Mon 15, Washington's Birthday |
| March | Wed 10, Id-ul-Fitr; Tue 23, Holi; Fri 26, Good Friday | None |
| April | Thu 15, Ram Navami; Mon 19, Mahavir Jayanti | None |
| May | Mon 17, Id-ul-Zuha; Thu 20, Buddha Purnima | Mon 31, Memorial Day |
| June | Wed 16, Muharram | Fri 18, Juneteenth, observed |
| July | None | Mon 5, Independence Day, observed |
| August | Wed 25, Janmashtami. Independence Day and Id-e-Milad both fall on Sunday 15 | None |
| September | None | Mon 6, Labor Day |
| October | Fri 29, Diwali. Gandhi's birthday and Dussehra fall on Saturdays | Mon 11, Columbus Day |
| November | None; Guru Nanak's Birthday is Sunday 14 | Thu 11, Veterans Day; Thu 25, Thanksgiving Day |
| December | None; Christmas Day is a Saturday | Fri 24, Christmas Day, observed; Fri 31, New Year's Day 2028, observed (on OPM's 2028 schedule) |
Count the rows and the two lists never share a weekday in 2027. Delhi closes on eleven of them and the US federal calendar on twelve others, counting 31 December: New Year's Day 2028 is a Saturday, so most federal staff take the Friday before it. A team split between the two loses one side or the other on 23 working days. Where a weekend swallows an Indian holiday, the memorandum gives no substitute day off.
The Indian closures bunch in spring. Five of the eleven fall between 10 March and 19 April, and a two-week sprint that starts on Monday 22 March has ten working days and loses two of them to Holi and Good Friday. The US closures bunch late in the year: five between Columbus Day on 11 October and New Year's Eve, which is the stretch to line up a deputy who can accept demos.
Four Delhi dates follow the moon. The memorandum lets the government move Id-ul-Fitr, Id-ul-Zuha, Muharram and Id-e-Milad on short notice, announced through the press, so treat those as provisional until the week arrives. And this is a government list for government offices. A private company sets its own, so ask any vendor in India for its holiday list covering your build, ours included, before the sprint plan is drawn up.
The GoodFirms software development cost survey asked more than 100 software companies about their prices in September and October 2025, and 38.7 percent of those that answered were in Asia. The report we read was updated on 28 September 2026. Its rate table mentions India by name, which is why we use it here.
| Hourly band | Share of firms | Where India sits | Work the survey ties to it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $20 | 12.5 percent | Named, with Bangladesh and Pakistan, as South Asia | MVPs and experiments for startups and small firms, where price outranks quality and security |
| $20 to $50 | 56.3 percent | South Asia is listed among the regions | Web apps, ecommerce platforms and mobile apps for smaller and larger companies watching cost |
| $50 to $100 | 12.5 percent | Not listed | Specialist skills for mid-sized firms and funded startups |
| $100 to $250 | 10.9 percent | Not listed | Mission-critical work needing accountability, high security and domain depth |
| Above $250 | 7.8 percent | Not listed | Boutique and specialist firms serving large enterprises and government |
Two things follow. An Indian quote under $20 an hour sits in the band the survey links to experiments where cost matters more than quality and security. And a band says nothing about who answers in your hours, whose account holds the repository, or how many review hours your own staff will spend. Put any quote you receive into an hourly figure with our free quote checker, then judge it against everything else on this page.
A fixed-bid build from us is quoted as one price, not as an hourly rate. Built from Delhi and Lucknow, a focused first version costs $40,000 to $150,000, and a complex enterprise platform $250,000 to $500,000 or more. SaaS MVPs from us generally fall between $30,000 and $80,000. Your fixed figure follows the two-week discovery sprint, and our page on what pushes a custom software budget up or down explains the moving parts.
The paperwork with us runs in four steps. It opens with a one-page mutual NDA, which both sides sign once a scoping call is on the calendar; past client work is shown only after that. Next is the MSA, which names the entity you contract with and, for a US client, normally picks New York law, with any dispute heard in New York. Delaware, England and Wales or Singapore law, or JAMS or LCIA arbitration, are open to negotiation.
Each build then gets a statement of work, with a fixed bid once discovery ends. Our terms make the paper the deal: a promise made on a call or in a proposal binds neither side until it appears in a countersigned MSA or SOW. Once you pay the final invoice, the work created for your project is assigned to you. Libraries and tooling we owned before your project, or built for reuse, stay ours.
Code written in India by an Indian company is governed at the start by India's Copyright Act, 1957. Two of its sections decide whether the assignment in your contract does what you think it does, and one US definition catches buyers who rely on American wording.
| Provision | What it says | What to check in the draft |
|---|---|---|
| India, section 17(c) | An employer is the first owner of work its employee makes under a contract of service, unless they agree otherwise | The people writing your code are the vendor's employees, or any contractor has signed an assignment to the vendor |
| India, section 19(1) | An assignment is valid only in writing, signed by the one assigning | A signed clause, not an email or a line in a proposal |
| India, section 19(2) | It must identify the work and state the rights, the duration and the territory | All four named in the clause |
| India, section 19(4) | Rights the assignee does not exercise within one year are deemed to lapse, unless the assignment says otherwise | Words that switch the lapse off |
| India, sections 19(5) and 19(6) | With no period stated, five years from the assignment; with no territory stated, India only | A stated period and a worldwide territory |
| US, section 101 | A commissioned work is made for hire only in nine named categories, by signed agreement; Circular 30 lists them, and software is not named | An express assignment of copyright, not the words work made for hire alone |
The trap in that table is silence. An assignment from an Indian company that never mentions duration or territory can be read as five years, inside India, which is not what a US buyer paying for a product believes it bought. Read our clause against all six rows before you sign, as you would any Indian vendor's, and send the questions to legal@digitalheroes.co.in.
Ownership is also practical. Your repositories and cloud accounts are set up under your name and billed to you, and our engineers join them as collaborators whom you can remove.
We may show finished work in our portfolio. Tell us in writing and yours stays out of it; a stricter clause that leaves us no portfolio rights at all can go into the SOW, at a price we state in advance. This section reads the statutes for buyers; it is not legal advice, so have your own counsel read the draft.
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 is Act 22 of 2023, enacted on 11 August 2023. Its rules took longer: the government notified the DPDP Rules, 2025 on 14 November 2025, with an 18-month timeline for phased compliance. Section 3 applies the Act to digital personal data processed inside India, which is where an Indian team works on it.
Section 17(1)(d) is the clause a US buyer should know. Where someone based in India processes the personal data of people outside India, under a contract with a person outside India, most of the Act stands aside: Chapter II except two duties, the rights in Chapter III, and section 16 on transfers abroad.
The two duties that remain are section 8(1), responsibility for complying with the Act for processing done directly or through a processor, and section 8(5), reasonable security safeguards to prevent a personal data breach. They carry weight. The Act's schedule sets the penalty for failing to take those safeguards at up to 250 crore rupees.
The exemption covers people outside India only. Once Indian users sign up, the full Act and Rules reach their data.
By the government's summary of the Rules, that means a standalone consent notice for each purpose, a plain-language notice to every affected person after a breach, and an answer to each request to access, correct or erase data within 90 days. Section 8(6) of the Act adds a breach notice to the Data Protection Board. Plan those screens into the first release, not the fifth.
Health data adds US rules on top. Any build that touches protected health information comes with a Business Associate Agreement signed by us, and those builds are hosted on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, covered by the cloud provider's own BAA. Our HIPAA practices have been reviewed by an outside, independent firm. The rest is on our healthcare software page.
Like the contract section, this is a buyer's reading of the statute, not legal advice.
What the Delhi and Lucknow engineers build falls into seven kinds of system, most with a page of their own. Builds for particular sectors, from healthcare to logistics, are grouped on our industries page.
The stack follows the system, and every part of it has developers on our own team: Next.js and React for most web work, Laravel or Angular where your system already runs on them, Node.js for APIs, PostgreSQL on Supabase for records and roles, React Native by default for mobile, with Flutter, Swift or Kotlin when needed, and Python for AI and data work. We built this site's live chat assistant, and the AI copilot in our own CRM, in-house.
Workforce planning for clinics and hospitals, where we built the whole platform and its website. It draws up monthly shift rosters and routes each vacation request up three approval levels, checking it for conflicts within a specialty. It also tracks tasks, records attendance at training sessions, reminds staff before a certification expires, drives the duty display screens, gives six roles their own views and keeps an audit history.
A web-to-print shop for labels, race numbers, stamps and trophies. Buyers lay out their item in an editor that runs in the browser and can upload a CSV to personalize every piece in a run. The system produces proofs and print files and keeps a status trail for each order, takes payment through PayFast with webhook confirmation, sends transactional email, and gives three roles their own admin views. Stack: Next.js 15, React, TypeScript, Supabase.
Each client agreed to be shown here. Neither build has a results figure, so we give none. Our 5.0 rating on Clutch comes from 66 verified reviews (checked 13 October 2026).
Scale is the usual reason. On the India Brand Equity Foundation's IT page, citing NASSCOM, the country's technology industry earned an estimated US$315.4 billion in FY26, counted to February 2026, and US$246.4 billion of that came from exports. The same page says the tech and AI ecosystem employs 6 million people.
Scale is a reason to look, not a reason to sign. The sections above are the checks that decide a particular firm: the hours it staffs, the calendar it keeps, the band its price sits in, the assignment clause and its handling of data. If you would rather compare firms than read about one, we ranked nine custom software development companies India has for buyers abroad, ourselves first and disclosed as such.
Your contract needs US-based engineers. Ours work in India and Australia, so we would be the wrong firm from day one. Our offshore software development company rankings show where each other firm's engineers sit.
The job is below our minimum. We staff nothing smaller than one senior engineer with one designer, and at that size a freelancer or a small agency is the better buy.
The plan calls for a very large team from the start. A big consultancy can put that many engineers on a contract at once. A company of 115 people, by our own count, cannot.
Demand for the product is still unproven. Run a cheaper test of the idea first; a custom build makes sense once people have shown they want it.
That turns on what you are buying. In our view, the largest firms by revenue rarely suit a first build that one small team will staff. Our ranked list of nine, linked in the section above, judges each firm on what a buyer abroad has to settle first, and every entry, ours included, says who it does not suit.
The US government does not expect it to. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects jobs for software developers, QA analysts and testers to grow 10 percent from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average, and counts building software for AI among the reasons. In our own builds, AI goes where a narrow task repeats, such as drafting a reply that a person then sends.
No official ranking exists, and the answer changes with the measure. The BLS counts about 1.9 million US jobs for software developers, QA analysts and testers in 2025, while IBEF says India's wider tech and AI ecosystem employs 6 million people; the two figures count different things. For one project, the better question is which team covers your hours, signs your contract and can show you live work.
With us, a SaaS MVP usually costs $30,000 to $80,000, and a focused first version of a business system $40,000 to $150,000. Hourly bands in India start under $20, by the GoodFirms survey in the rates section. For phone apps in particular, our mobile app cost page breaks the price down by app type.
Mostly not. Section 17(1)(d) of the DPDP Act sets aside most of its duties when a firm in India processes data about people outside India under a contract with someone outside India. Two duties stay: responsibility for compliance and reasonable security safeguards against a breach. Data about users in India gets the full Act. The data section has the detail.
Yes, through a written, signed assignment. Under India's Copyright Act the vendor first owns what its employees write, then assigns it to you. Make the clause state a period and a worldwide territory, because a silent one can be read as five years within India. With us, the assignment of everything written for your project takes effect when the final invoice is paid, and the repositories are yours throughout.
On the government's 2027 list for Delhi, eleven holidays fall on weekdays, five of them between 10 March and 19 April, and Diwali is on Friday 29 October. None coincides with a US federal holiday, so between the two calendars one side is closed on 23 working days. Ask your vendor for its own list, since private companies set their own.
With us, the MSA names one of two: Digital Heroes Technologies Pvt Ltd in India or Digital Heroesco LLC in the US. Settle which one before your lawyer reads a draft, and match the name against our Dun and Bradstreet record, DUNS No. 650878346. Our credentials page explains that lookup and the others.
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Bring the problem, the systems it touches and the dates your team is away. We book calls five or more days ahead, which gives our discovery lead time to study what you send, and the written scope and quote reach you within two days of the call. Book a call.
115 people across five studios in New York, Delhi, London, Sydney and Lucknow, 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.
Co-Founder · Lucknow · 27 posts on the site
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