Working together
Working with us from outside South Africa
We are in South Africa and most of our clients are not. That raises three fair questions before anyone signs anything: when can we actually talk, who owns what gets built, and how does the money work. This page answers all three without you having to ask.
When we are both at a desk
South Africa is UTC+2 and does not observe daylight saving, so these shift by an hour on your side twice a year, not ours.
United Kingdom
We are 1-2 hours ahead
- Best time to call
- Any time in your working day
Effectively a shared working day. A 10am call in London is midday here and neither side is stretching.
United Arab Emirates
We are 2 hours behind
- Best time to call
- Your late morning onwards
Also effectively a shared working day. Our 9am is your 11am, and we are both at a desk until your early evening.
United States, East Coast
We are 6-7 hours ahead
- Best time to call
- Your morning, our late afternoon
A standing 8am Eastern call is 3pm here. Real overlap runs from roughly 3pm to 6pm our time, and we keep those hours for US work.
For context: Poland is 6 hours from New York and Ukraine is 6 to 7. South Africa is the same distance from the US East Coast as the Eastern European market that American companies have hired from for fifteen years. India is 10.5 hours. The comparison that matters is the one you are already comfortable with.
Contracting, ownership and getting paid
The questions that decide whether a cross-border engagement is comfortable, answered before you have to ask them.
You own the code, in writing
Intellectual property in everything we build for you transfers to you, and it lives in a repository you control from the first commit rather than being handed over at the end. That clause is in the agreement before any work starts, not negotiated afterwards.
Contracting you will recognise
A master services agreement covering confidentiality, IP, liability and termination, then a statement of work per engagement with its own scope and price. We will work under your paper if your legal team prefers it, and we sign NDAs as a matter of course.
Tax paperwork, already handled
We are a South African company, so a US client will need a completed W-8BEN-E from us to avoid withholding. We have it ready. South Africa has a double taxation agreement with the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.
Invoiced in your currency
USD, GBP, AED or EUR, by bank transfer or by Wise. Net 14 or net 30. Larger engagements are milestone-billed against the statement of work rather than invoiced in one lump at the end.
How a remote engagement runs
- A written scope before any build starts, which is yours whether or not you proceed
- One standing call a week inside your working hours, not ours
- Written updates between calls, so nothing depends on you being awake for a conversation
- Your own access to the repository, the pipeline and the issue tracker from day one
- Work delivered in reviewable increments, not revealed at the end
Why distance stops mattering
Every release goes out through an automated pipeline with a health check and automatic rollback. Every page of this site is measured against a written performance budget before it ships. None of that depends on anybody being in the same room, or the same hemisphere.
The discipline that makes remote work is the same discipline that makes software maintainable. We would run it this way even if you were down the road.
Working across borders: common questions
What happens if something breaks while we are asleep?
For anything we host or maintain, monitoring alerts us rather than you, and our morning is your night, so most incidents are found and fixed before your working day starts. Response windows are agreed in the statement of work rather than left vague.
We have never contracted outside our own country. Is this difficult?
Less than people expect. The agreement, the invoicing and the tax form are all standard and we have them ready. The part that actually needs thought is communication rhythm, which is why the cadence above is fixed up front instead of improvised.
In London, Dubai or New York?
Tell us what you are trying to solve and which time zone you are in. You will get a reply with a suggested next step, inside your working day.
A reply from a developer. Not a sales pipeline. The person who reads your message is the person who would do the work.
An honest answer on fit. If an off-the-shelf product solves your problem better than a custom build, we will tell you which one.
No obligation. A first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Discovery output is yours either way.