Hiring a senior AI engineer in San Francisco or London runs $180k–$250k a year, and they take months to find. Offshore AI development gets you the same skill — LLM apps, agents, RAG pipelines, automations — for a fraction, shipping in weeks. Done wrong it wastes your runway on rework. Here’s how the money actually breaks down in 2026, and how to hire a team that ships instead of stalls.
$25–$60/hr for a senior offshore AI engineer, vs $120–$200/hr at a US/UK agency. The catch: hourly means scope creep. Prefer fixed scope.
$8,900–$45,000 for a production AI product in 6–10 weeks — chatbot, agent system, or LLM feature inside an existing app. The 15–30% premium over a plain MVP covers the parts that make AI reliable: data pipelines, evals and guardrails.
$80k–$250k for the same scope. You’re paying for senior rates, office overhead and a project-management layer — not better engineers.
See our full 2026 MVP cost guide and pricing.
Ask to see a shipped AI product with a live link — anyone can demo a notebook. Confirm who writes the code and how senior they are. Insist the contract gives you 100% of the code and IP in your own repos. Pay in milestones against working demos, not hours. And check timezone overlap — AI builds need tight feedback loops, so you want real hours of overlap with your day.
More on vetting: how to outsource without getting burned.
We’ve shipped AI products across 10+ countries — LLM tools, agents, automation. Senior engineers only, a fixed price within a business day, a working demo every Friday, milestone payments, and 100% code ownership. We overlap the full Gulf workday, the EU and UK working day, and US-East mornings.
By the DappaSol team — 100+ products shipped since 2020. Last updated June 2026.
With a senior-only team, yes. DappaSol delivers AI products at offshore cost with a track record (ShapeShift, CoinDesk, Komodo) and you own all the code.
We overlap the full Gulf working day, EU and UK mornings to afternoon, and US-Eastern mornings — with scheduled evening calls for US clients.
AI builds from $8,900 — a fraction of US/UK agency rates, and without juniors.
By the DappaSol team — 100+ products shipped since 2020. Last updated June 2026.