What a four-person team in Addis actually costs
Everyone quotes an hourly rate. Nobody quotes the overhead, the ramp-up, or the month you lose to a bad hire. Here is the full arithmetic of our own engagements.
A prospective client in Portland asked us a fair question last month: if your engineers are this good, why are you a quarter of the price? The honest answer has three parts, and only one of them is what people assume.
The rate is the smallest part of the story
A senior engineer in Addis Ababa is paid well by local standards and a fraction of a Bay Area salary. That gap is real, and it is the number most buyers fixate on. But rate alone tells you nothing about the cost of a project — three teams at the same rate can differ by a factor of two in total spend, because what you actually buy is decisions per month, not hours per week.
The second part is structure. We run four-person teams: two senior engineers, a lead who still writes code, and a designer shared across two engagements. No account manager, no delivery manager, no bench amortised into your invoice. When you pay us for four people, four people are in your repository.
You are not buying hours. You are buying the number of correct decisions a team makes per month — and that is where cheap teams get expensive.
The arithmetic, unrounded
Below is the shape of a typical six-month engagement, including the overheads most firms keep to themselves. The numbers move with seniority and scope, but the proportions hold.
| Line item | Per month | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Two senior engineers | $8,960 | 50% |
| Tech lead, full-time | $5,400 | 30% |
| Designer, half-time | $2,240 | 12% |
| Infrastructure, tooling, review time | $1,300 | 8% |
Illustrative of a 2026 engagement at a $28 blended rate. Your scope will move these numbers; the shape is what matters.
Where we are more expensive than you expected
Two places. The first is the lead: we will not staff a team without one, even at four people, because an unsupervised offshore team is how outsourcing earned its reputation. The second is the first month, which we spend reading your existing system and writing the plan — and which we bill for. It looks worse on paper than the alternative and considerably better six months later.
The saving that remains is still large. But it comes from geography and structure, not from cutting the parts of the process that keep software alive.
How to compare quotes properly
Ask any team you are evaluating for three things: the names of the people who will do the work, what happens in week four, and what they would cut first if your budget dropped by a third. The answers cost nothing to give and are almost impossible to fake.
Price your own scope
The estimator runs the same arithmetic as this article — four questions and you have a range you can take to your board.
Get an estimate →