Outsourcing to Costa Rica
Unless you are in Costa Rica, your project is going to be technically “outsourced” to a Costa Rican company. Even if you are operating in Costa Rica, parts of your project might be developed in other countries, thus you are outsourcing without even knowing it. Please read below to find out how that benefits you.
Our model
Our model builds on how drop-shipping works in the online business. Companies in that business do not stock, so they do not have to pay for storage and do not have to deal with clearance sales to deal with the leftovers. That helps them cut cost and act on demand.
We learnt from this model, so we decided not to stock employees, but pull in associates for each project as necessary.
Then we went a step further and decided to switch to a telecommuting model, and cancelled our office. We have our meetings over video chat or VOIP and we work from home offices. The reward is low environmental impact and savings on transportation and office costs.
The price difference
We are located in Costa Rica where labour is cheaper than it is in many other places. Our associates are located mostly in Costa Rica and Hungary, and we have most of our hosting in the US where it is reliable and cost effective.
Together with “our model” we can keep our costs low and give you good prices while keeping quality. How low? Check our page on fees.
Quality
We work with associates we know. Our associates hold degrees in software engineering, systems engineering or other computer related fields attended numerous trainings and hold certificates in various technologies and products. We work with people with a minimum 5 years of experience for larger, minimum 3 years for smaller projects.
If we work with someone new, we always start with a small (2-3 hour) project and keep a back-up person on standby and quote deadlines accordingly.
Tico Time
If you live in Costa Rica you probably already know this expression, otherwise it might need a little explanation. Tico stands for Costa Rican, so Tico time literally means “Costa Rican time”. What it really means is quite OK at the beach, but quite annoying when dealing with business matters. This is an expression used to describe how “we will call you tomorrow”, “I send you an email next week” and how “5 o'clock sharp” could refer to “sometimes”, “not for sure” or many cases “never”.
Even though we are based in Costa Rica and some of us were born and raised here, we will get back to you when we say, and we won't make you chase us for anything. Even if we cannot answer something we get back to you and let you know. We know, that this sounds natural for most people, but we felt we had to mention it for a good reason.
Time zones
Time zones have been a major problem associated with outsourcing until multinational corporations introduced the “follow the sun model” and placed support centers in multiple time zones. We are not big enough to afford support centers around the world, but fortunate enough to be able to communicate with you in a relatively large time window whether you are in Europe, Americas, or Asia, thanks to our partners in Europe, and thanks to being in the “Central America” time zone, which is around PST.