FREQUENTLY Asked questions

Three: staff augmentation, a dedicated team, and a full product build. What separates them is how much stays on your side. With staff augmentation, individual senior engineers join the team you already run, and your engineering manager directs them day to day. With a dedicated team we assemble and coordinate the whole group, but you still decide what it builds: the roadmap and the weekly priorities stay yours. With a full product build you run nothing. You bring a problem and a budget, we run discovery, agree the scope with you, and we are accountable for the finished product. The short test is who decides what gets built next month. Your engineering manager, with augmentation. You, with a dedicated team. Us, answering to you, with a product build. The first two are billed by the hour and run 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, and we will say which one fits on the first call. Full detail on the first two is on the staff augmentation page and the dedicated teams page.

Who assembles the group and who coordinates it. With staff augmentation you add individual engineers into a team you already run, and your engineering manager directs them day to day. With a dedicated team we build the group role by role around your product, staff every seat, and assign a CodigoDelSur project manager to coordinate it at no extra cost. In both models the engineers work only on your product and you own the roadmap and the priorities. Augmentation is usually the better answer for one to three people when your own team already works well. A dedicated team is the better answer when you own a product area and do not have the people, or the management capacity, to run it yourself.

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, plus cloud and DevOps on AWS and Azure, 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 has been building software from Montevideo, Uruguay since 2007: more than 250 clients, more than 300 applications shipped, and products used by more than 300 million people.

Both, and most of our 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.

Five business days from signed agreement to an engineer's first day, or as soon as the next business day if the person is already on our bench and your side is ready to receive them. 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 we have to recruit, first CVs take about five business days. A whole team follows the same timings seat by seat and is limited by its slowest role, so a team where everyone is already on the bench is working within a week, and roughly a week longer for each role we still have to recruit. 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, all of them, and you can turn down anyone we propose without giving a reason. You get a named CV for every candidate, with the projects they have worked on and the experience behind them, not an anonymized profile, and you run your own interview process with your own questions and your own bar. If you would rather set a paid trial task than run a technical interview, we do that instead. For a dedicated team we propose the shape of the group and argue for it, and you still interview every person in it. What we ask in return is that you tell us early if someone is not right, rather than in month two.

Our 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 three to four hours with the United Kingdom, in their afternoon. 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.

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 person. Everyone we place is a CodigoDelSur employee rather than a freelancer sourced for your project, so retention is our problem to solve and not yours, and on a dedicated team the rest of the group already knows your codebase and keeps delivering while we solve it.

You own it, exclusively, and yes we do. Everything created for you is assigned to you 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 to you. We also warrant that what we deliver does not infringe any third party's intellectual property. For our own pre existing components, the ones 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, and we are happy to sign yours as well. In practice we work inside your repositories and your cloud accounts, so in most engagements the code never lives anywhere else to begin with.

Two weeks, one sprint, for every model, and either side can stop with two weeks of written notice. It runs on one standard services agreement, signed once. We do not require a master agreement plus a separate statement of work per role unless your procurement process asks for that structure, in which case we sign it. The agreement also gives you the right to terminate for convenience, without cause, on fourteen days written notice. There is no annual lock in and no termination fee. 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.

You change 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 role: one business day to first CVs if the profile is on our bench, about five business days if we have to recruit. Reducing takes two weeks of written notice. Volume discounts follow the size of the group, 5 percent from 5 people and 10 percent from 7, so growing a team lowers the rate rather than triggering a new negotiation. If the work pauses entirely, you give the same two weeks of notice and stop. When you come back we will tell you honestly whether the same people are still available, rather than promising that they will be.

Between $50 and $99 per hour in US dollars, by role, seniority and stack, with volume discounts of 5 percent for groups of 5 people or more and 10 percent for 7 or more. Invoicing is per sprint for hours worked, terms are Net 14, and we bill monthly instead if your accounting team would rather receive one invoice a month. The rate is all inclusive: no recruiting fee, no placement fee, no management fee, no charge for the ten day handover if we have to 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 yours, and travel to your office is billed at cost and only when you ask for it. The smallest realistic engagement is one engineer for one sprint.

Someone on your side 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 your 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 your side has that time, we will say so before you sign, because it is the most common way these engagements fail and it fails on the client side rather than the vendor side.

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, which is usually smaller than the team that built it. Several of our engagements have run on that basis for years rather than months: Shutterfly for more than three years, Grubhub from 2018 to 2022, 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.

One call, 30 to 45 minutes, with no deck. We ask what you are building, what stack it is in, what seniority you need, your sprint cadence, and who the engineer or the team will report to. By the end of that call you will know which engagement model fits, whether the profiles are already on our bench or have to be recruited, and what each option means for your start date. If what you need is not something we should be selling you, we will say that on the same call rather than in month four. Get in touch to book it.