Hire A Dedicated Software Development Team That Ships In 6 Weeks
A dedicated software development team is 3 to 8 senior engineers in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, who work only on your product: a tech lead, developers and QA. You set direction and talk to them directly. InApps handles hiring, HR, payroll and retention, and 92% of our engineers are still on the same team after 12 months. Market benchmarks put a starter squad at USD 13,000-23,000 a month.
Two Raw Sisters: a five-person dedicated team, 25+ releases since August 2025, none late.
Trusted by engineering teams in 15+ countries, from seed-stage startups to Prudential.
Why offshore teams fail,
and what a dedicated development team changes.
Offshore doesn’t fail because of the location. It fails because of the model: shared engineers, rotation and slow answers. A dedicated development team removes all three, with the same engineers on one product, inside your channels, for as long as the roadmap runs. You’ve probably lived through at least two of these:
The engineer on your standup is also billed to four other accounts. Nobody will tell you that.
A two-hour question becomes a two-day delay, then a week of rework.
Three months of onboarding walks out the door. The replacement has never opened your repo.
Sprints close green. Code fails review, or never got reviewed at all.
Your senior engineers lose ten hours a week managing the vendor. The exact thing you outsourced to avoid.
One root cause: engineers who were never actually yours.
What is a dedicated
software development team?
A dedicated software development team is a group of engineers who work exclusively on one client’s product, full-time and long-term, under that client’s technical direction. Unlike project outsourcing, the client owns the roadmap and sets priorities. Unlike a contractor pool, the engineers are not shared, rotated or reassigned when a higher-paying account arrives.
At InApps, that team is recruited, vetted and managed for you in Ho Chi Minh City. You direct the work and own 100% of the code. No entity to register, no office to lease. Those are ours.
InApps’ dedicated development team services cover the whole unit: recruiting, a tech lead, QA, a secure office, devices, payroll and retention.
Three things make it dedicated
Exclusivity.
Your engineers work on your product only. Never split, never billed to two clients in the same month.
Direct access.
You talk to the people writing the code, in your Slack, standups and code reviews. An engagement manager handles HR, never your technical decisions.
Continuity.
92% of our engineers are on the same team after 12 months. Your product context stays put.
Dedicated team, staff augmentation,
or your own development center?
Pick the wrong model and you pay either way. Structure you don’t need, or a contract you outgrow in six months. Here’s how the three compare.
| Criterion | IT staff augmentation | Dedicated team | Offshore development center |
|---|---|---|---|
| You get | 1-2 engineers into your existing team | A full exclusive team - engineers, tech lead, QA | An engineering branch in Vietnam under your brand |
| Who employs them | InApps | InApps | InApps, with transfer to your entity from year two |
| Who carries delivery risk | You | Shared: you set direction, we keep the people | Shared, with a center manager |
| Natural next step | A dedicated team, once you need 3+ engineers and a lead | An ODC, once you pass about 10 engineers | Build-operate-transfer to your own entity |
| Upfront setup cost | None | None | Yes |
| Typical size | 1-2 | 3-8 | 10+ |
| Time to running | 1-2 weeks | 4-6 weeks | 6-8 weeks |
| Scaling and exit | Per person, 2 weeks’ notice | Up or down on 30 days’ notice after a 3-month minimum | 30 days’ notice, build-operate-transfer from year two |
| IP ownership | 100% yours | 100% yours | 100% yours |
Size and setup separate them. A dedicated team is a 3-8 engineer squad you rent with a 30-day exit. An ODC is a branded center of ten or more engineers, with a path to your own entity. Choose a dedicated team when you have a roadmap, need three to eight engineers, and don’t need a center of your own yet.
Full comparisons: ODC vs dedicated team vs staff augmentation · Staff augmentation vs dedicated team
What’s included
in every dedicated team.
Your team
- Senior vetted engineers
- dedicated tech lead
- QA engineer
- a dedicated QA team when quality is the bottleneck
- optional PM
- team shape built around your roadmap
Your infrastructure
- Managed secure office and workstations
- high-performance devices
- VPN, SSO and access control
- ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified security
Our operations
- Recruiting and onboarding
- payroll and Vietnamese labor law compliance
- performance management
- retention and replacement cover
Your process
- Agile ceremonies in your format
- your tools and documentation standards
- real-time reporting
- 2-4 hours of live overlap with Europe, 4-5 with Australia, a fixed daily window with US time zones
- AI-assisted code review and test generation
Roles and stack we staff
One dedicated engineering team covers web, mobile and backend application development, plus AI features, so you don’t split one product across vendors.
Roles
Stack
You get the cost structure of offshore hiring with the accountability of an in-house team.
Hire a dedicated development team:
first call to shipping code in under six weeks.
Scope
Tell us the roadmap and the gaps. We define roles, team shape and size. No intake form.
Recruit
We source and vet against your stack. You interview the finalists and pick your team. The first engineer usually starts in 2-4 weeks.
Onboard
Codebase walkthrough, tool access, process alignment, first sprint. The team is shipping.
Run and scale
You run the sprints. We run the people, performance, retention, payroll, and add or drop headcount as the roadmap moves.
You direct the work from day one. You never touch the hiring, the payroll or the paperwork.
Build your teamUnder 3% of applicants
get near a client codebase.
Technical assessment.
Real-world coding challenge, architecture interview, code quality under time pressure.
Communication and English.
Technical writing, a client-facing scenario, spoken fluency. B2 minimum, no exceptions.
Soft skills and collaboration.
A live scenario: unclear spec, sprint going sideways. We watch how they ask, push back and report.
Final project review and references.
Technical panel, background check, values alignment.
15% pass the technical assessment. Under 5% get past soft skills. Under 3% are placed.
What a dedicated software
development team costs.
A dedicated development team in Vietnam costs USD 13,000-23,000 a month for a three-person starter squad and USD 28,000-70,000 for a product squad of five to eight, at 2026 market rates. One monthly fee per engineer, no recruitment fee, no bench cost.
| Team shape | Typical setup | Best for | Market benchmark / month | Typical first 90 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter squad (3) | 2 engineers + 1 QA | One product stream, or testing the model | USD 13,000-23,000 | One feature stream live in production, with a test automation baseline |
| Product squad (5-8) | Tech lead, 4-6 engineers, QA | A full product roadmap | USD 28,000-70,000 | A full roadmap quarter on two-week sprints, with CI/CD and QA gates |
| Multi-squad (10-20) | 2-3 squads with shared tech leadership | Several products, or the step before your own ODC | From USD 48,000 | Parallel product streams under one architecture review |
Benchmarks are 2026 market rates, not InApps quotes. A senior full-stack engineer in Vietnam bills USD 30-50 an hour, against USD 120-200 in North America, which is about USD 4,800-8,000 a month at 160 hours (full rate table by role). A senior engineer hired in-house in the US costs USD 190,000-250,000 a year fully loaded, about USD 16,000-21,000 a month (A.Team).
| Driver | Effect |
|---|---|
| Seniority mix | Senior-weighted teams cost more per head and ship with less rework |
| Team size | Larger teams lower per-engineer overhead, raise coordination load |
| Stack rarity | React and Node cost less than Rust, LangGraph or embedded |
| Commitment length | 12-month engagements price better than quarterly |
How to estimate your own team
Starter squad:
2 senior full-stack × USD 4,800-8,000
+ 1 QA automation × USD 3,520-6,400
= USD 13,120-22,400 a month
The same three people hired in-house in the US cost about USD 48,000-63,000 a month at A.Team’s fully loaded band. The dedicated team comes to roughly one fifth to one half of that.
One monthly fee per engineer covers salary, benefits, office, hardware, HR and retention. No recruitment fee, no bench cost.
Get a costed team plan
Ask the people who stayed,
not the ones we picked
Every quote below is from a verified review. None of them were written by us.
Dedicated development teams
in production.
Wawa Games · Dedicated Development Team
Live arcade app, Indonesia
InApps was the main development team for 12 months: critical fixes from the previous vendor first, then new features across iOS, Android, backend and DevOps.
Two Raw Sisters · Dedicated Team
Food & wellness app takeover
The previous vendor left no documentation and critical bugs live. Since August 2025 a five-person dedicated team has stabilized the app, resynced its data, added analytics and a web version.
Impressions Debt Services (formerly Citizen Debt Services) · Dedicated Team / ODC
US debt-relief platform takeover
The company had inherited a platform it could not run alone. InApps took end-to-end technical ownership, stabilized the system, cleaned up its architecture and kept delivering in US working hours.
More dedicated team case studies: Qualee, a 22-person team over 18 months · Vleppo · All case studies
Outgrowing the contract?
Keep the team, own the center.
Start with three engineers and grow without re-hiring: once your dedicated team passes about ten engineers, we convert it into your own offshore development center with the same people and the same codebase knowledge. Build-operate-transfer then moves it to your entity from year two.
When this works.
And when we’ll tell you it doesn’t.
Good fit
- Three or more engineers needed full-time, exclusively on your product
- A roadmap rather than a one-off project
- You want to cut hiring cost without adding management overhead
- You want the same engineers still there in eighteen months
Wrong fit, and we’ll say so on the first call
- Fixed scope with a hard deadline → project-based development
- One specialist for six weeks → IT staff augmentation
- Only QA capacity needed → QA and testing services
- Roadmap not defined yet → talk to us next quarter
An honest no on the call beats a mismatched team six weeks in.
Frequently Asked Questions
Dedicated team, staff augmentation or ODC: which fits?
Who manages the engineers day to day?
How long does it take to get a dedicated development team running?
How much does a dedicated software development team cost?
What’s included in the monthly price?
What’s the minimum team size and contract term?
What happens if a dedicated developer leaves mid-project?
Can we hire the engineers directly later?
Who owns the code and IP?
How is our code and data protected?
What about time zone overlap?
Why Vietnam rather than India or Eastern Europe?
Ready to add senior engineers to your roadmap?
Book a 30-minute call. We will map the roles, the timeline and a cost range - and tell you plainly if we are not the right fit.
Send us a project brief
The more of the shape you give us, the more useful the first reply is. If the answer is that you should hire locally, or that another firm fits better, we will say that instead.