A Cost-Effective Guide on Hiring an Offshore PHP Developer

Key Takeaways

• Learn about what benefits PHP development offshore can bring specifically to your type of business. 
• Discover the non-obvious benefits of hiring a PHP developer and how such a type of developer can help speed up project development.
• What are the essential points to pay attention to when hiring a PHP developer? Find this out in one of our sections.
• Explore with us the most popular locations for offshoring your PHP project.
• Get exclusive tips from Aimprosoft on how to cut costs when hiring PHP developers.
• Check out a complete 6-step guide on how to hire an offshore PHP developer and avoid major challenges on your way. 
• Is Aimprosoft really one of the best providers of PHP services for your project? See for yourself in the article below.

PHP is one of the world’s most widely used programming languages, which is not unexpected given that it is affordable, simple to use, and scalable. Because of this, many top international companies use PHP to build web products. Facebook, WhatsApp, and Slack are among these enterprises. PHP is also used by more than 455 million websites that are hosted on WordPress. 

So, hiring a PHP developer is the best solution if you want to develop an easily scalable product in the short term. But in addition, product development utilizing PHP is already cost-effective because of the availability of ready-made solutions, libraries, and plugins. However, there is one more thing that can help you double the reduction of development costs, namely, hiring PHP developers from the company overseas. In this guide, we want to bring you up to speed on where and how to find PHP developers and the best offshore locations where you can hire PHP developers offshore at minimal cost without losing quality. Keep reading, and you will get a bunch of useful tips gained in more than 17 years of software development.

Benefits of offshore PHP development for your businesses

First of all, to ensure that offshoring your PHP project is a good idea, here are a few facts about the benefits you can get from PHP offshore development. But first, check out what tech professionals say about offshoring and its benefits:

Versatile solution

Offshoring PHP development suits businesses and projects of different sizes and can bring a variety of benefits. 

• Enterprises that work with an offshore PHP web development company get the following benefits 一 a wide range of experienced professionals overseas that gives you an opportunity to expand the existing team in case of local shortage, adoption of new business practices from the outside, and the ability to maximize your profit while keeping cost down. It is also possible to open a new office in another country or R&D center, where it will be cheaper because of the lower taxes. 

• For SMBs, the advantages of a partnership are even more clear 一 cost-effectiveness, no need to manage work processes within the team, and the implementation of knowledge and experience gained in cooperation with leading and experienced companies. You also get the opportunity to triple your staff without high expenses since specialists from overseas are usually cheaper.
  
  Derek Gallimore, CEO of Outsource Accelerator, says, “With offshore staffing, you may be able to triple your workforce, which could enable you to potentially out-grow, out-maneuver, and out-compete other companies in your market.” And you receive round-the-clock tasking; while your PHP team works during the day, the PHP offshore team can work late into the night on the other side of the globe.
  
• Fast-growing startups can benefit from offshoring in a number of ways, including increased process flexibility, reduced development costs, and the capacity to concentrate on key business goals and not on the management of in-house employees. You also gain knowledge from experienced IT players about how to avoid mistakes in product development, which is especially important if you are developing software for the first time or don’t have much experience in it.

Cost reduction

Outsourcing PHP development to offshore countries has been used mostly for two main reasons: to fill technology gaps and to reduce development costs. Although the United States is a technological leader, it currently has a labor shortage. This is another key reason why many countries outsource now. Yes, outsourcing development overseas allows access to a larger talent pool, but it also cuts costs in half because prices are lower in foreign regions. Let’s look at an illustrative example in the table:

You can gain the advantages listed below in addition to the cost savings:

• You do not have to pay taxes on each employee as the employer.
• When developing offshore, there are no costs associated with the onboarding stage, employee retention, and additional training.
• In the case of constructive termination, you are not required to pay.
• You don’t need to invest in maintenance and upgrade of the workstation or take care of utility costs.

Wide choice due to a global pool of technical talent

Scalability strategies among technology leaders, whose responsibilities include hiring qualified talent, expanding and developing new products, implementing cutting-edge technology on schedule, and maintaining sufficient security, are defined by access to a large pool of technical talent. For instance, about 280,000 PHP developers work in the Ukrainian IT hub, according to LinkedIn. Additionally, the market for specialists is expected to rise by 25–30% per year, which increases your chances of successful hiring.

Quick vacancy closing

Searching for programmers on your own within your company can be time-consuming and costly. Instead, you can choose staffing from a well-known IT partner which will offer the most pertinent CVs of PHP developers right away. Hence, instead of knocking on people’s private messages on various talent search networks, you get in touch with shortlisted developers at the interview stage arranged by a software vendor. 

Hire offshore PHP programmers from IT companies located overseas, enables you to continue product development and quickly bridge the technology gap. The potential benefit of working with an outsourcing firm is that you will always have access to a pool of several IT specialists who will be available as you scale up.

Offshoring PHP can be the best solution for different types of businesses, bringing them plenty of benefits. And now, let’s get down to business and learn some useful tips on what to take into consideration before offshoring your PHP project to an external company.

The advantages of hiring a PHP developer for your project that you might not be aware of

The popularity of PHP is a logical outcome of its many benefits, all of which combine to make it a potent and successful programming tool. Our team leader, who leads the PHP department at Aimprosoft, has provided the following list of benefits of using PHP for your website or application development.

Popularity = faster developer employment

PHP was the most popular language a few decades ago, and you can still see it today, based on the number of sites written with it. To be precise, there are more than web products built in PHP. But even now, PHP is not losing its position. If you google, for example, “how to develop a site-card,” you will immediately see references to how to do it exactly in PHP. Because of such popularity, the number of specialists who know this technology is huge, namely, more than 6 million in the world. As a result, finding programmers for the project won’t take long, and offshore organizations will have plenty of developers available.

Out-of-the-box solutions = accelerated time-to-market

PHP comes with many ready-made solutions, such as CMS systems (i.e., WordPress, Magento). For example, if your product needs to be built from scratch and further managed and expanded in a cost-efficient and fast way, the best option to do so is to hire a PHP developer with knowledge of such a system. Based on this fact, we understand that PHP and its out-of-the-box solutions can help you reduce development time, which means a more rapid product launch.

Full-stack specialists = budget savings

PHP is a language used for writing the backend side of the product. However, with high competition in the market and, as a result, the evolution of a PHP developer’s profile, the majority of such specialists have also become knowledgeable in developing the client side of the solutions. PHP developers differ from others because almost all of them can handle frontend tasks, take part in infrastructure design and development, deploy applications, and work with databases. When you hire a PHP developer, you’re essentially hiring a versatile, full-stack developer who can work on multiple tasks, so instead of two developers, you can hire one.

After analyzing the advantages of hiring PHP developers, let’s view what you should take into account when hiring them to reduce the likelihood of employing an unqualified developer, losing time, and stagnating the development process.

Key factors to consider before hiring an offshore PHP developer?

Hiring the perfect PHP developer can take time and effort. Unlike the fact that there are obvious criteria, such as professional skills, to consider when looking for a PHP developer, there are also additional factors that may not immediately come to mind; however, they are no less important. We’ve picked some helpful tips you should pay attention to avoid failing when hiring a PHP developer.

An impressive portfolio 

A portfolio can tell you much more about a developer than a tech interview. In this case, a portfolio indicates a PHP developer’s knowledge and experience. Potential candidates’ portfolios should necessarily include projects similar to yours and preferably similar stack. The more experience an engineer has with the technologies you plan to use, the fewer difficulties there will be while developing your project. And therefore, a faster time to market is ensured.

Soft skills

When selecting a PHP developer, talent acquisition managers often think they must possess the following characteristics solely: profound expertise in PHP, experience with popular PHP frameworks like Laravel or Symfony, deep knowledge of modern CMS systems, and expertise in working with APIs. And this is a correct judgment, but no less critical criteria are soft skills, precisely communication skills. 

Our PHP team leader, Evgeniy Inyakov, says that he always pays attention during interviews to how candidates communicate and deliver their thoughts. Since if someone cannot explain the problem to the team members or stakeholders, it may slow down the development process and cause misunderstandings. Therefore, always pay attention to how well the PHP developers’ interpersonal skills are developed, how well they understand the project’s goals and can help achieve them, and explain their own ideas. 

Ability to keep up with technology updates 

To develop the best solution, it is crucial to stay up with the quick technological changes. Undoubtedly, PHP is changing as well. For instance, several new versions were introduced in 2022 alone, and several more will be available in 2023. Therefore, you should look for PHP developers who can handle the most recent PHP and its stack-related updates and adapt to these changes. It is preferable to hire developers eager to stay current with changes to produce modern solutions, solve problems promptly, and keep your product up to date.

Cost

Cost is one of the fundamental factors to consider when hiring a developer. Experience, hard, and soft skills are all incredibly important. But if you don’t calculate your finances and hire a developer you can’t afford, you risk going over budget. For instance, going over budget is a frequent cause of failure for many startups. So always carefully choose the developer with a reasonable hourly rate for you.

So, in the last paragraph, we described the problem of failure of many projects due to going over budget. Let’s now consider where to hire offshore PHP developers and which options will be more profitable and can help you minimize all possible risks.

Where can you hire the right offshore PHP developers?

The location you choose for offshoring your PHP project can affect numerous aspects of your product development. For example, whether you will fit your budget, meet your deadlines, or ensure your data will be well-protected. Location does affect all of these factors since you can run across a region with a bad reputation in the overall offshore web development services market, the one with a not sufficiently extensive talent pool, etc. We have selected for you several popular locations and highlighted their strengths and weaknesses, and it is up to you to choose the most suitable one. 

Region: Eastern Europe. Popular destination: Ukraine 

One of the best offshore destinations in Eastern Europe is Ukraine, and here are a few reasons why you should consider hiring PHP developers there. In its report on the attractiveness of various nations for IT outsourcing in 2020, the DAXX company ranked Ukraine as the top offshore software development nation in Eastern Europe and one of the best in the world for hiring developers. Access to one of the biggest talent pools and affordable prices, like 35-55$ per hour, are the leading reasons. The IT sector in Ukraine grew by 13% despite the full-scale war, which has been going on since February 2022, and the market size reached close to $5.5 billion. According to the DOU survey conducted in April 2022, 91% of IT experts were back at their work, demonstrating that the Ukrainian IT sector has maintained productivity and has continued to be one of the powerful drivers of the country’s economy.

These facts once again confirm how Ukrainian developers are enduring, stress-resistant, and ready to work even in the most difficult situations. Despite the challenging circumstances, many IT companies in Ukraine continue to work on projects without dropping out of work, having moved their offices to safe zones, and provided them with generators and Starlink kits, so that client data remains protected, and nothing could disrupt the development process. For instance, our company, Aimprosoft, successfully relocated our office to a secure place shortly before the war started; therefore, we haven’t abandoned projects for a day. We even signed a new contract on the 24th of February, once the war started.

The weak point in this area is the time difference. For instance, there are different time zones between North America and Europe. This allegedly great justification, however, has the advantage that when you awaken, your offshore staff will be able to provide you with an update on the job and the results of completed tasks.

Region: Latin America. Popular destination: Brazil

Brazil is young but rapidly gaining popularity for outsourcing. And this is shown by many studies and reports. For example, São Paulo, ranked in the top 10 by Kearney, is rapidly becoming the digital center of Latin America and is attracting many tech startups. The tech industry in Brazil has grown as a result of two particular factors. Over the past ten years, the country has made substantial investments in infrastructure and provided sizable tax incentives for businesses engaged in technological innovation. In addition, Brazil’s outsourcing sector employed around 500,000 software engineers in 2021.

However, the area also presents a number of drawbacks, such as a lack of security or the non-compliance of Latin American nations with global security norms like HIPAA. The comparatively high cost of development in such a young outsourcing destination is another negative factor. The average PHP developer’s hourly wage in Brazil is between $47 and $75.

Region: Asia. Popular destination: China

China is ranked 14th out of 113 nations in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2020, a yearly evaluation of countries based on their innovations. When hiring Chinese developers, you may be confident that you are working with highly qualified people. China’s universities graduated 7.6 million students in 2020, almost twice as many as American universities. In actuality, many American companies, including Amazon, Apple, Pfizer, and others, have outsourced IT services to China. Regarding the hourly rates, the average cost of a  PHP developer in China is $45. 

However, while transferring the development to offshoring in China, you can meet with certain difficulties. Such as IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) rules may differ from international ones. You should learn more about China’s copyright and trademark laws, particularly if the service provider has access to your designs, product concepts, source code, and other intellectual property. You may encounter a language barrier in China, where hundreds of millions of people learn the language, but less than 1% of mainland Chinese can speak English.

Choosing a location is one of the essential steps to successful offshoring. But now it is worth moving on to an equally important point about how to save as much as possible during offshore development.

How to save budget by hiring an offshore PHP programmer? 

The best rates in an offshore location

The main factor that allows you to save the budget when offshoring is the right choice of location as we already mentioned in the section above. For example, companies from the USA chose offshoring because their local development prices are very high, so they transfer their project to those who charge less for the same work. Let’s see how development prices vary from country to country.

The cost of living, taxes, national average incomes, demand, and other factors frequently impact development prices. As a result, you need not be concerned about the quality of the service when selecting the option that seems the most advantageous to you. For instance, outsourcing PHP programming to a country like Ukraine implies exceptional job quality, strong professional qualifications, and cost-effectiveness. That’s how you can save money by choosing a location.

Seniority level

To save money when offshoring PHP development, it’s worth hiring developers at the middle or senior level, and here’s why. If you decide to save money on the hourly rate and hire a junior developer, you are risking other global costs. For example, your young specialist will need a mentor because juniors are still inexperienced and often make mistakes in the code. Hence, you will need to hire or attach existing skilled specialists who’ll review the code and teach such an employee, which results in extra spending, development delays, and low-value outcomes.

By hiring more experienced professionals, you can avoid this scenario. After all, seniors and mid-level professionals no longer need a mentor, they are independent, and many of them can start a project from scratch and deploy it. The investment here is more than justified: you hire a more expensive skilled specialist, they do the work properly, and you do not risk wasting money because of the inexperience of a cheaper specialist.

Conduct a discovery stage 

An overly optimistic outlook and unclear objectives, according to 40% of CIOs, are some of the main reasons IT projects fail. Such a tragedy as a failure of your project also brings another misfortune, the loss of your financial investments. Therefore, to avoid such a fate, it is recommended before hiring developers to make a discovery stage before the start of development if you still need a detailed estimate, especially if this is your first software project.

You can identify the project’s key goals at the discovery stage, gather all the vital requirements, and adequately document them for the dev team. This critical step is the key to success, keeping your budget and increasing the chances of successful product delivery. You can always ask for help and conduct the discovery stage at Amprosoft. 

Hidden costs to keep in mind

Here are a few hidden costs that you will have to prepare for and calculate finances for such cases: 

Product enhancements

It is important to keep in mind that your in-house team has a key benefit: if the project needs to be edited, you won’t be charged extra (unless, of course, it requires overtime). Engaging with overseas businesses is different because you must pay hired developers for each change you make to the project. 

To avoid constant time stretching due to continuous changes in product functionality, you need to conduct a discovery stage, which we discussed earlier, and hire BA to structure and outline a clear path for the implementation of the product, its features, and the overall concept. This way, you won’t make radical changes halfway through or go over budget and deadline in case you hire overseas specialists.

PHP core or frameworks experience?

Even though the majority of PHP developers have a versatile tech stack nowadays, there are still specialists with knowledge of solely basic PHP without using popular frameworks. However, by hiring a developer with PHP Core knowledge, you risk slowing down your project’s development process. Hiring a developer with experience with PHP frameworks will be much more efficient.

Since PHP frameworks have lots of functionality out of the box, they can accelerate the development process and help with database connections, file handling, debugging, and lots of other activities. You may cut costs and move your project closer to completion by saving time. For instance, Aimprosoft PHP developers have the expertise in using the following set of tools, including some of the most frequent frameworks:

These were exceptional tips on how you can create your project and hire developers without hidden costs and without overpaying. Let’s now find out how the process of hiring an offshore PHP programmer goes. 

Step-by-step guide on how to hire offshore PHP programmers and setup fluent workflow

Step №1 Consider the requirements of your project

Before hiring someone, take some time to determine your primary hiring goals. This will help you save time and money. Clearly define your priorities and analyze whether you need to expand your team at all, how many developers you will need, what exactly the developer or developers will be working on, and what kind and how big your project is. Also, make a rough workflow and schedule to understand the position better. 

Determining these things will make it easier for you on your offshoring journey, and you’ll be able to move more quickly to the next steps. 

Step №2 Create a “vision board” to find the perfect candidate

If you want to hire an offshore PHP development team, It’s crucial to know precisely which company is your ideal candidate and state your requirements in detail. We advise creating a detailed developer profile that specifies the kind of technology one should be familiar with, the number of years of experience, the types of tasks he should be able to perform, and other factors to save time and reach the objective. Let’s look at a sample profile of a qualified PHP developer below: 

• Strong in PHP
• Knowledge of widely used PHP frameworks (e.g., Laravel, Symfony, Zend)
• Profundity in at least one contemporary CMS system (e.g., WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla)
• Knows how to work with APIs
• Knowledge of and application of software design principles (e.g., KISS, SOLID)
• Has incredible communication skills
• Understands a product’s lifecycle
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving abilities
• Understanding of app maintenance and scaling

Step №3 Select a location for offshoring

What should be taken into account when picking an offshore destination? The incorrect choice of an offshore location can cause a lot of problems, including scheduling conflicts caused by too large a time difference, poor performance, issues with payments, a bad reputation in the region, additional taxes, etc. Though every person must, of course, make their own choices, Aimprosoft offers the following tips so you can’t go wrong: 

1. Decide on an area with a time zone that is suitable for you.
2. Keep in mind that the area should comply with international security laws.
3. Select a region where PHP developers are reasonably priced.
4. Take into account a region with a sizable labor pool.
5. Pay attention to the population’s proficiency with the English language and high degree of education.

Step №4 Find a reliable service provider in a chosen region

It’s crucial to carefully select a PHP software development company. So how do you verify its reputation and reliability? Look up customer reviews on websites like TechBehemoths, Clutch, and GoodFirms.  Before you begin cooperation, have a look at the vendor’s website’s blog or portfolio. This will enable you to select a supplier who can offer you properly qualified employees who will carry out all tasks responsibly.

Step №5 Сonduct the interview

When you apply to an offshore company, in most cases, you rely on the company’s expertise, and an interview may not even be necessary. A CV of applicants who meet your specifications will be provided to you, and you can select the one who is most appropriate for your project. However, you can also select a number of specialists from the company’s talent pool and conduct online interviews with them. In this situation, test assignments are uncommon because the provider is also accountable for the quality of work. You can even shorten the hiring process in this way. 

Step 6: Sign the сontract

Once you’ve decided which candidate can accommodate your request, signing the contract is time. Aimprosoft can give you advice based on our 17 years of market experience on the factors you should consider before signing a contract. First, confirm that the contract contains all NDAs, expected results, penalties for failures, payment requirements, termination clauses, and other critical provisions that guarantee your expectations are clearly defined, desired results are well-documented, and you are protected from unpredictable outcomes.

You can save money, decrease the risk of misunderstanding while offshoring, and boost the likelihood that your product will be successful by adhering to these practices.

How Aimprosoft can assist your business in hiring offshore developers?

We have discussed offshoring and its advantages for your business and how to hire PHP developers more affordably. And if you currently want to hire an offshore PHP development company for your PHP project, Aimprosoft is a reliable IT partner to consider. And now, let’s investigate why:

• 17+ years in the IT industry
• 600+ released projects 
• 80% of our customers come back to us to work on new projects
• We have experience in 7 domains, including education, e-commerce, healthcare, real estate, retail, telecom, and IoT
• We currently have over 100 clients from the U.S., Europe, Canada, and Asia
• Input to the overall increase in Ukrainian IT exports is estimated at 20.44%

Security

As we said earlier, our company has taken care of the autonomy of the employees’ workplaces beforehand. The office of the company is located in Ivano-Frankivsk (the western part of Ukraine), and it is supplied with all the necessary equipment for a non-stop operation, including Starlink and generators. Currently, the office’s technological setup enables us to work autonomously and continuously for a week while keeping workflow. Thus, we keep the work process going uninterrupted, despite the difficult political situation in the country.

Models of cooperation satisfy everyone’s demands

Aimprosoft is a software development company that offers businesses of all sizes, from startups to SMBs, a wide range of pricing and collaboration models to match your business needs.

Business Models: 

• Staff augmentation
• Dedicated team
• Full Cycle Development 

Payment Models:

• Fixed price
• Time and material 

Our PHP portfolio

We would like to share with you some examples from our portfolio. Unfortunately, we can’t reveal the names of all the projects because of NDA, but we can explain to you the challenges and the final result.

Case 1 

Ramtool: Magento-based online store for selling electronic tools and their spare parts

Client request: Our client was searching for an offshore PHP application development to build a B2B2C e-commerce site using the Magento 2 Community Edition from the ground up, customizing some of the OOTB functionalities.

Result: Our team created an online store with a smooth CX. By adding an additional eCommerce store to the chain of current stores, we helped our customer increase revenue.

Case 2

TMI: a platform for supplying information and research to help individual investors build and protect their capital

Client request: Redesigning the primary website for external users and the present platform for internal users were requests made by the customer.

Result: With our help, the client was able to create a product that allows customers to effortlessly manage investments, stay up to date on industry news, plan personal activities, etc., from a lackluster service.

Case 3

Learning Management System for healthcare organizations

Client request: The assignment was to develop a learning management system to meet the educational requirements of healthcare organizations.

Result: Core functionality was developed using Moodle’s OOTB features, and iterations were made to suit industry standards. Users of LMS have access to regulatory paperwork, company updates, protocols, and training materials. We developed a productive LMS that aid medical businesses in maintaining staff learning and regulatory compliance.

Conclusion

To summarize, PHP is an easy, integrable language that will speed up your development process. However, when hiring such specialists, businesses can face various challenges, such as a lack of local talents, high rates, lack of expertise in assembling an in-house team, and others. In that case, you can turn to offshore firms that can provide you with a comprehensive list of qualified developers at a reasonable price for assistance. And Aimprosoft is such a vendor. Our PHP developers are ready to help you whether you need to update your present software solution or create a new PHP-based product from scratch. Please get in touch with us so we can analyze your particular needs and provide you with the appropriate solution.