Hire a software house in Pakistan from abroad: what to expect

You run a business in London, Dubai, Toronto or Texas. You need software built, local quotes are high, and a colleague mentions a team in Lahore. Then the doubts arrive. Will they answer when I need them? How do I even pay them? What if they vanish with my code?

Those are the right questions. This post answers them plainly, from how we actually work.

What should you expect when you hire a software house in Pakistan from abroad?#

Expect a registered company, a written fixed-price proposal, payments split into milestones, a weekly look at working software, and full handover of code and accounts at the end. At 77-Technologies you pay 40% to start, 30% when you approve the working version and 30% at launch, by international wire or Wise, with an official invoice each time. You get one named contact for the whole project, and every account ends up in your name.

The rest of this post walks through each part, including the parts that are genuinely harder across borders.

How do you check that a Pakistani company is real?#

Start with registration. We are 77-Technologies (Pvt) Ltd, a private limited company registered with the SECP, Pakistan's company regulator, under registration number 354090989. We have been operating for more than five years from Model Town, Lahore.

Then look at work you can verify. Our international example is Priority Tire, a high-volume tyre retailer in the United States. For them we built a custom customer-support agent, and they have hired our team again and again for research and development, digital campaigns and product ideas. To be precise: we did not build Priority Tire's website. You can read about this and our other projects in our recent work.

A real company will also sign an NDA before you explain your idea. We do that free of charge.

How do time zones actually work?#

Lahore runs on Pakistan Standard Time all year, with no daylight saving. Our working hours are Monday to Saturday, 10:00 to 19:00 Pakistan time, and we reply on messages within one working hour inside those times.

What that means for you depends on where you are:

• Gulf: almost the same working day. This is the easiest setup.
• UK and Europe: your morning overlaps with our afternoon. Most clients book the weekly call before their lunch.
• US and Canada: the overlap is short, so we plan for it. We agree a fixed call slot at the edge of both days, and the rest happens in writing.

Honestly, the time difference can help. Say you run a small e-commerce business in Chicago. You send feedback at the end of your day, we work on it during ours, and the changes are on your review link when you wake up. The trade-off is that a quick live chat is not always possible, so decisions need to be written down clearly. We prefer that anyway.

How do invoicing and payments work from abroad?#

Simply. You get a written quote, valid for 14 days, with two lists: what is included and what is not. Once you approve the scope, the price is fixed. If you add features later, they are quoted separately and you approve them first.

Payment follows milestones:

1. 40% to start. This books the team and covers design and scoping.
2. 30% when you approve the working version. You have already clicked through it.
3. 30% at launch.

International clients pay by bank wire or Wise. We do not take card payments yet. Every payment gets an official invoice, and tax is added where applicable. If you prefer to pay 100% upfront, there is a 5% discount, but you never have to.

Our website shows prices by visitor country, so you will see the list for your own region in our packages section. Larger or unusual projects are quoted after a short call.

What does the day-to-day process look like?#

You will not be passed around. You get one dedicated contact person from the first call to launch, plus direct access to the team on the weekly review call.

Each week you open a private review link and see the real software, not slides. Designs come first: one tailored concept with two rounds of revisions, and you approve it before any building starts. Then the build, then testing, then launch. A business website takes 2–3 weeks, a web app 4–8 weeks and a mobile app 6–10 weeks. Your proposal carries a committed date, and delays on our side do not cost you extra.

You can see each stage laid out in how we work.

What do you get at handover?#

Everything. On final payment, the domain, hosting, code repository and every account are in your name, with documentation. There is one recorded screen-share training session so your team knows how to run it.

This is the part people worry about most, because it is where cheap arrangements go wrong. A developer who keeps the passwords keeps you. With full handover, any other developer can take over later, and you are never locked in.

After launch, the first month of support is free. After that, a monthly care plan is optional. It covers updates, backups, monitoring and small changes.

What can go wrong, and how is it handled?#

Two things, mostly.

Unclear scope. Across time zones, a vague brief costs days. That is why we write the "included" and "not included" lists before any money moves.

Silence. The fear of a team that stops replying is real in any market. The protections are structural: a registered company you can check, payments that only follow working software, and a signed agreement with our office address on it. If we fail to deliver a milestone as written and cannot fix it, you get that milestone's payment back. That is in our public refund policy.

A short checklist before you sign#

• Verify the company's registration, not just its website.
• Get a fixed written scope with "included" and "not included" lists.
• Agree milestone payments by wire or Wise, with an invoice for each.
• Fix a weekly call slot that works in both time zones.
• Make sure every account and the code end up in your name.

If that sounds like the way you want to work, tell us about your project. A real person on our Lahore team will reply.