Offshore software for Singapore, with the trade-offs spelt out

Why Singapore firms build offshore, and what they give up

The case for an offshore team is cost: engineering time in India costs less than in Singapore, so the same budget buys a larger or more thoroughly tested build. The price of that saving is distance. Nobody from our side will sit in your office, every discussion happens on a video call, and someone on your team must be free to make decisions quickly. Think of a Singapore distributor that wants an order portal for its retail customers, or a tuition centre that wants parents to book and pay for classes online. Both suit a remote build, because the requirements can be written down and checked on a screen. A project that needs daily on-site work alongside your staff does not.

Our work in the region

CertTulen Academy, a Microsoft Training Services Partner, operates across India, Malaysia and Singapore, and we built the platform behind it: courses, cart, payments, certificates and the admin that ties them together. The CertTulen case study shows how one system serves buyers in three countries. Unisoft Pte Ltd was among our early clients in the region. If your business also trades in Malaysia, our Malaysia page explains ringgit quotes and Curlec payments.

Money: our invoices and your checkout

We price every project in rupees first; for a Singapore client, that figure is converted to SGD at the rate on the day we quote, so the proposal you sign shows Singapore dollars. Each milestone is then paid by international wire. For your own customers, we integrate Stripe to accept international card payments and settle them to your business bank account. The Stripe account is opened in your company's name, which keeps the money and the merchant relationship with you rather than with your developer.

The PDPA and where your data lives

Singapore's Personal Data Protection Act 2012 governs how your organisation collects, uses and discloses personal data. In general terms, it asks for consent to stated purposes, reasonable security arrangements to protect what you hold, and a designated person accountable for data protection. Hosting is the part a developer controls most directly, so if you want data kept in Singapore, we deploy the application and its database to a Singapore region of AWS or Google Cloud. Whether your wider practices satisfy the Act is for your data protection officer to decide, not for us.

Grants, stated plainly

Singapore SMEs often ask about the Productivity Solutions Grant, which co-funds pre-approved solutions from pre-approved vendors. We are not a PSG pre-approved vendor, and none of our work comes with grant eligibility, so every quote is a full, unsubsidised price. If a pre-approved package covers what you need, it may cost you less after the subsidy, and you should take it. Custom work earns its place when your process does not fit the packaged options, and our comparison of subscription software against one-time custom builds sets out how the costs play out over several years.

Tamil-speaking customers

Tamil is one of Singapore's four official languages. We build Tamil and bilingual interfaces for clients in Tamil Nadu, and the same work applies to a Singapore business whose customers or staff read Tamil, from a Little India retailer to a community organisation. Our Tamil Nadu page explains what a Tamil interface involves.

Three checks before you commit

Everything runs remotely, from discovery through the weekly demos of our six-step process to testing, staff training and handover. So confirm three points first: how your accountant records an invoice from an overseas supplier, whether any of your own client contracts dictate where data is hosted, and who on your side will sign off each milestone, since no one from our team will be in the room to hear an informal yes.