FREQUENTLY Asked questions

Nearshore software development means hiring an engineering team in a nearby time zone instead of one on the other side of the world. For a company in the United States that usually means Latin America, where the working day overlaps with both coasts. An offshore partner eight to twelve time zones away can be cheaper per hour, but the overlap is small or nonexistent, so a question asked in the morning gets answered tomorrow and a production incident waits for someone to wake up. CodigoDelSur works from Montevideo, Uruguay, at UTC minus 3, which sits inside the US East Coast working day for the whole day.

CodigoDelSur offers three: staff augmentation, a dedicated team, and a full product build. What separates them is who decides what gets built next month. With staff augmentation your engineering manager decides, and our engineers work inside the team you already run. With a dedicated team you decide, and we assemble and coordinate the group around your roadmap. With a full product build we decide and answer to you, after running discovery and agreeing the scope. Staff augmentation and dedicated teams are billed hourly for as long as you need them; a product build is scoped and quoted per project. We sell all three, so we have no reason to steer you into the wrong one. Full detail on the first two is on the staff augmentation page and the dedicated teams page.

Staff augmentation adds individual engineers to a team the client already runs; a dedicated team is a group CodigoDelSur assembles, staffs and coordinates around one product. With augmentation the client's engineering manager directs the work day to day. With a dedicated team CodigoDelSur builds the group role by role, staffs every seat, and assigns a project manager to coordinate it at no extra cost, while the client keeps the roadmap and the weekly priorities. In both models the engineers work only on the client's product. Augmentation usually fits one to three people when the client's own team already works well. A dedicated team fits a product area the client owns but has no people, or no management capacity, to run.

Four questions separate a real partner from a good deck. Which named project did each proposed engineer actually work on, and can I interview them? What exactly did your team build on that project, and what did the client's own team build? What is your replacement policy if someone is not working out, and who pays for it? And what happens at the end: do you hand the product over to our internal team, and have you done that before? A partner who cannot answer the second question with a straight face is claiming credit for somebody else's work. CodigoDelSur answers all four on the first call, and in writing if you want it in writing.

CodigoDelSur's standard is five business days from a signed agreement to an engineer's first day, or the next business day if the person is already on our bench and the client is ready to receive them. What varies is finding the right person, not starting them: if the profile is on the bench, CVs arrive one business day after the role brief is signed off, and if the role has to be recruited, first CVs take about five business days. A whole team follows the same timings seat by seat and is limited by its slowest role. We tell you which case you are in on the first call, before you have signed anything, because that is what actually sets your start date.

Yes, every one of them, and the client can turn down anyone CodigoDelSur proposes without giving a reason. Each candidate comes with a named CV listing the projects they worked on and the experience behind them, not an anonymized profile, and the client runs their own interview process with their own questions and their own bar. A trial task instead of a technical interview works too. For a dedicated team we propose the shape of the group and argue for it, and the client still interviews every person in it. What we ask in return is early notice when someone is not right, rather than in month two.

CodigoDelSur's working day is 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 hours are set later than a normal local day on purpose, to widen the Pacific overlap without putting anyone on a night shift. That matters more than it sounds: standups, sprint planning and demos have to sit inside normal working hours on both sides, or they quietly stop happening around month three and the engagement turns into email.

CodigoDelSur is a custom software development company founded in 2007 and based in Montevideo, Uruguay, with a team of around 140 people. It has worked with more than 250 clients, from early-stage startups to large funded companies, and products it has built have reached more than 300 million users. The first client the company signed, in 2007, is still a client today. Clients with published case studies include Grubhub, Shutterfly, Skout, DroneDeploy, MoviePass, Help Scout and Leadpages. Independent reviews as of September 2026: 4.8 out of 5 across 53 reviews on Clutch, 4.6 across 67 reviews on Google, 4.9 across 5 reviews on GoodFirms, and 4.6 across 5 reviews on TechBehemoths.

CodigoDelSur builds mobile apps, web applications and the backends behind them, for companies in the United States and the rest of the world. Native iOS in Swift and Objective-C, native Android in Kotlin and Java, cross platform in React Native and Flutter, frontend in React, Next.js, TypeScript, Angular and Vue, backend in Node.js, Python, Ruby on Rails, .NET, Java and Go, cloud and DevOps on AWS and Azure, plus QA, product design, and AI work in Python with LLM APIs and retrieval pipelines. Integrating with third party platforms, APIs and legacy systems is routine rather than a special case, because most of what we work on already lives inside somebody else's ecosystem.

CodigoDelSur's deepest track record is in agriculture and agtech, fintech, education, healthcare, and drone and geospatial software. In agriculture it has built for Milc Group, Bluefin, Caravela, AgroScout, DroneDeploy and Skippy Scout, which is why drone flight software and field imagery keep showing up in its work. It also builds well outside those industries: marketplaces, media, legal technology and logistics are all in the portfolio. The honest version is that industry experience shortens the first month rather than deciding the outcome, so we tell clients which of our projects is genuinely close to theirs and which one is only adjacent.

Both, and most of CodigoDelSur's work is in code somebody else wrote. Our engineers commit to your repositories, work in your release process and follow your standards, including in code that has been running for years: we have worked in Backbone.js and jQuery alongside a modern React application, and in Ruby on Rails tooling behind a large product catalog. Rewrites, framework migrations, redesigns, integrations and new applications from zero are all normal engagements. If you are handing over a codebase nobody has documented, say so on the first call. It changes what the first month looks like, not whether we take the work.

The minimum contractual term at CodigoDelSur is two weeks, one sprint, for every engagement model, and either side can stop with fourteen days of written notice. It runs on one standard services agreement, signed once, with no annual lock in and no termination fee, and it includes the right to terminate for convenience, without cause. Ending an engagement can also mean handing the product to the client's own team, and we have done that: the Milc dairy platform ran with a CodigoDelSur team for nine years, forty people at peak, and closed with a full handover to the client's in-house team, with the platform live and still shipping. The $10,000 figure on our directory profiles is a minimum project size, which is a different thing: it is a filter on project scale, not a commitment we hold you to.

CodigoDelSur invoices per sprint for hours worked, on Net 14 terms, and bills monthly instead if the client's accounting team would rather receive one invoice a month. Volume discounts follow the size of the group: 5 percent from five people, 10 percent from seven, so growing a team lowers the rate rather than triggering a new negotiation. The hourly rate is all inclusive. There is no recruiting fee, no placement fee, no management fee, no charge for the ten day handover when we replace someone, and the project manager assigned to a dedicated team is not billed at all. Two things are not included, so there are no surprises: third party licences and cloud spend are the client's, and travel to the client's office is billed at cost and only on request. The smallest realistic engagement is one engineer for one sprint. We give you the rate for your specific roles and seniority on the first call.

The client changes the size of the engagement inside the same agreement, in both directions, without renegotiating it. Adding a person takes the same time as filling any other role, and reducing takes fourteen days of written notice. Volume discounts follow the size of the group, so growing a team lowers the rate instead of opening a new negotiation. If the work pauses entirely, the same fourteen days of notice apply and it stops. When the client comes back we say honestly whether the same people are still available, rather than promising that they will be, because the alternative is promising a name we cannot deliver.

The client owns everything, exclusively, and CodigoDelSur signs NDAs. Everything created for the client is assigned to the client with full title guarantee as it is created: source code, application logic, APIs, integrations, data models, configurations, UI and UX designs, documentation and any derivative works. The assignment is not conditional on final payment, and it is ownership rather than a licence back. We also warrant that what we deliver does not infringe any third party's intellectual property. For our own pre existing components, the ones not written specifically for the client, the client gets a non exclusive, irrevocable, royalty free licence to use, copy and modify them, so nothing we bring with us can be used to lock anyone in later. Every CodigoDelSur employee signs a non disclosure agreement and an intellectual property assignment as a condition of employment, and we sign the client's agreement as well. In practice we work inside the client's repositories and cloud accounts, so in most engagements the code never lives anywhere else to begin with.

CodigoDelSur replaces the person at its own cost, with 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 the client's team, and those ten days are not billed: during the handover the client keeps paying exactly what they were paying for one person. Everyone we place is a CodigoDelSur employee rather than a freelancer sourced for the project, so retention is our problem to solve and not the client's. On a dedicated team the rest of the group already knows the codebase and keeps delivering while we solve it.

The client needs one person who can set direction and unblock decisions, plus access. For staff augmentation that means an engineering manager or tech lead with the capacity to review pull requests and give the person a clear next thing to do. For a dedicated team it means a product owner in sprint planning and the demo, and someone who can answer product questions during the week. Week one is codebase, domain and account onboarding, run with whoever on the client's side has the context. Everything else is ours: equipment, accounts, background checks where they are required, payroll, time off coverage, performance management and retention. If nobody on the client's side has that time, we say so before anything is signed, because it is the most common way these engagements fail.

Yes, and for most clients it is the same people who built the product. Maintenance, feature work, releases and store submissions run on the same hourly terms and the same two week minimum, at whatever size the product actually needs. In practice most of our long engagements are not maintenance at all: they are continued development, new features built on a product that is already live and already has users. Shutterfly ran that way for more than three years, Grubhub from 2018 to 2022 and MoviePass from 2022 to 2025. Continuity is the point: the same engineers keep the context, so a bug in code written two years ago does not start with somebody reading it for the first time.