Compare the options honestly.
Dedicated team or staff augmentation. Offshore, nearshore or onshore. Nepal or the alternatives. Written for people mid-evaluation, including the cases where the answer is not us.
Size a team ↗Which shape of help you are actually buying.
How to evaluate whoever you shortlist, including us.
Location, and what it actually changes.
You get a standing team that owns the system. The vendor carries delivery and the context accumulates with them, year over year. Best when the work continues and nobody wants to rebuild understanding every quarter.
You rent individual engineers into your own team and run them yourself. You own architecture, review and delivery risk. Best when you have engineering management to spare and a specific, temporary capacity gap.
You hand over a specification and software comes back. The contract is the interface, and everything not written down is a change request. Best when the work is genuinely bounded and the context can be thrown away at the end.
The comparisons buyers actually ask about.
When should you choose a dedicated development team vs staff augmentation?
Ask where context should accumulate. Staff augmentation accumulates it in your own employees, so you need the management capacity to hold it. A dedicated team accumulates it in a team that stays, which is what you want when the system outlives any single project. If you have more engineering management than capacity, augment. If you have more roadmap than management, take the team.
Is outsourcing cheaper than a dedicated staffing model?
Per hour, usually. Per delivered change over a few years, often not. Fixed-scope outsourcing prices the specification, so everything learned during the build leaves at handover and gets rebuilt by whoever comes next. That re-learning is a real cost that never appears on either invoice.
Does nearshore beat offshore because of the time zone?
Overlap solves coordination. It does not create seniority, review discipline or retention, and nearshore rates have drifted upward precisely because the overlap carries a premium. Choose the operation first and let geography be the tiebreaker rather than the decision.
How do I compare vendors that all look the same on paper?
Compare on the things a proposal cannot fake: whether you can meet the engineers before signing, whose accounts hold the code, what is in the handover, and how the vendor describes an engagement that ended. Rate cards converge; those four answers do not.