If you are comparing alternatives to Toptal
This article is about how a development partner works, so you can decide whether that is the shape you need. CodigoDelSur is a software development company in Uruguay, building products since 2007, and we do one thing: we put engineers on your product and keep them there.
What that means in practice:
- A full time engineer works for one client only. Your standups, your sprint planning, your Slack. Their employment, payroll and career are our responsibility, not yours.
- You interview every person before they start, by name, and you decide. We send CVs, you run whatever interview process you run for your own hires.
- You can take one engineer or a whole team. One person inside your team, a team shaped around your product with a project manager on our side, or the entire product from discovery to store release.
- Design and QA are in house. When the work needs a designer or a QA engineer they come from the same team, not from a second vendor you have to coordinate.
How fast someone actually starts
Five business days from signed agreement to first day is the standard. If the engineer is already on our bench and your side is ready to receive them, they can start as soon as the next business day.
What varies is finding the right person, not starting them. If the profile is on our bench you get CVs one business day after you sign off the role brief. If the role has to be recruited, first CVs take about five business days. We tell you which of the two you are in on the first call, before you have signed anything, because that is what actually moves your start date.
The working day you share
Our engineers work 10:00 to 19:00 Uruguay time, which is UTC minus 3. That covers the entire US East Coast working day, five to six hours of live overlap with the West Coast, and an afternoon overlap with Europe.
The schedule is set that way deliberately: shifting the day an hour later widens the Pacific overlap without asking anyone to work nights, and it is the reason this arrangement is still working in month twelve rather than quietly falling apart in month three. If you want the longer version of that argument, we wrote it up in nearshore vs offshore.
What you commit to, and what it costs
The minimum project size is $10,000, roughly one engineer for one month, and the shortest engagement we sign is two weeks, one sprint. That is short on purpose: the first sprint works as a trial with real work instead of a test project.
There is no recruiting fee, no placement fee and no management fee, and the project manager on our side is included at no additional cost. Billing is per sprint, Net 14, or monthly if your finance team prefers, with volume discounts of 5 percent from five people and 10 percent from seven. What an engineer costs depends on seniority and on what the role covers, and you get the number in writing before you commit to anything.
If someone is not working out
You tell your account manager and we replace the person at our cost. There is no charge for the search and no penalty for asking. The outgoing and incoming engineers overlap for ten business days so that context, access and work in progress transfer inside the engagement instead of landing back on your team, and those ten days are not billed: during the handover you keep paying exactly what you were paying for one engineer.
We would rather absorb that than have you carry a bad fit for a quarter, and a company that will not put a replacement policy in writing is telling you something.
Who owns the code
You do, exclusively. Everything created for you is assigned to you with full title guarantee: source code, application logic, APIs, integrations, data models, configurations, UI and UX designs, documentation and any derivative works. The assignment covers the deliverables as they are created, it is not conditional on final payment, and it is not a licence back to you, it is ownership.
Every CodigoDelSur employee signs a non disclosure agreement and an intellectual property assignment as a condition of employment. In practice we also work inside your repositories and your cloud accounts, so in most engagements the code never lives anywhere else to begin with.
Products we have built
Since 2007, and every name below is on our portfolio with what we did on it.
Grubhub, Shutterfly and DroneDeploy are the kind of product where our engineers worked inside an engineering organization that already existed.
Help Scout runs a customer service platform its clients work in all day. Our engineers, inside the Help Scout team, migrated roughly five legacy sidebar applications from jQuery and Backbone to React, with feature parity and accessibility as explicit acceptance criteria rather than a follow up.
Acuant verifies identities for other companies. We built and maintained its iOS and JavaScript SDKs, including reading the NFC chip in a passport. That code runs inside other companies' production systems, so it ships through an automated release pipeline built for exactly that.
HeyConnect came to us after a third party MVP had failed. We reworked the database schema and the AWS infrastructure first, because everything above them depended on getting that right, and shipped the app in five months on the App Store and Google Play, at a 0.95 Apdex score. Anything above 0.94 is rated excellent.
When a development partner is not what you need
A one off task of a few days, with nobody on your side to own the result afterwards. A single design deliverable with no engineering attached. Or a budget below $10,000, which is our minimum project size. In any of those three, hiring a freelancer directly will serve you better and cost you less, and we will tell you so on the first call rather than after the contract.
Frequently asked questions
Do I get individual engineers or a whole team?
Either. One engineer inside your team is staff augmentation. A team shaped around your product, with a project manager on our side at no extra cost, is a dedicated team. The table above says what each one needs from you.
Can I interview the engineers before they start?
Yes, every one of them, by name. We send CVs after you sign off the role brief and you run whatever interview process you run for your own hires. Nobody joins your team without your yes.
What time zone do your engineers work in, and how much overlap will I get?
Our engineers work 10:00 to 19:00 Uruguay time, which is UTC minus 3. That covers the entire US East Coast working day, five to six hours of live overlap with the West Coast, and an afternoon overlap with Europe. The schedule is set that way deliberately: shifting the day an hour later widens the Pacific overlap without asking anyone to work nights, and it is the reason this arrangement is still working in month twelve rather than quietly falling apart in month three.
How fast can you actually start?
Five business days from signed agreement to first day is the standard, and if the engineer is already on our bench and your side is ready to receive them, they can start as soon as the next business day. What varies is finding the right person, not starting them: if the profile is on our bench you get CVs one business day after you sign off the role brief, and if the role has to be recruited, first CVs take about five business days. We tell you which of the two you are in on the first call, before you have signed anything, because that is what actually moves your start date.
What happens if the engineer is not working out?
You tell your account manager and we replace the person at our cost. There is no charge for the search and no penalty for asking. The outgoing and incoming engineers overlap for ten business days so that context, access and work in progress transfer inside the engagement instead of landing back on your team, and those ten days are not billed: during the handover you keep paying exactly what you were paying for one engineer. We would rather absorb that than have you carry a bad fit for a quarter, and a company that will not put a replacement policy in writing is telling you something.
Who owns the code and the intellectual property?
You do, exclusively. Everything created for you as part of the work is assigned to you with full title guarantee: source code, application logic, APIs, integrations, data models, configurations, UI and UX designs, documentation and any derivative works. The assignment covers the deliverables as they are created, it is not conditional on final payment, and it is not a licence back to you, it is ownership. We also warrant that what we deliver does not infringe any third party's intellectual property, and where third party material is involved we secure the consents for both sides first. For our own pre existing components that were not written specifically for you, you get a non exclusive, irrevocable, royalty free licence to use, copy and modify them, so nothing we bring with us can be used to lock you in later. Every CodigoDelSur employee signs a non disclosure agreement and an intellectual property assignment as a condition of employment. In practice we also work inside your repositories and your cloud accounts, so in most engagements the code never lives anywhere else to begin with.
Will the engineer work only for us?
A full time engineer works for one client only. If you take someone full time they are on your product and nothing else: your standups, your sprint planning, your Slack, and for practical purposes they are part of your team, with the difference that their employment, payroll and career are our responsibility. If you only need part of a person we do offer part time engineers, and a part time engineer is assigned to a maximum of two projects, never more. We tell you which of the two you are getting before you sign, because "dedicated" is a word this industry uses loosely.
Tell us what you are trying to build
Tell us what you are building, what your team looks like today and where you are short, and we will tell you on the same call which of the three models fits, who we would put on it and how fast they could start. Start here.
