Nearshoring software development to Egypt: what European buyers should check first

Nearshoring is usually sold on cost. That is the least interesting part. What decides the outcome is whether you can reach someone on a Thursday afternoon who understands your problem — and whether the work you paid for actually belongs to you afterwards.

Why Egypt rather than Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the default reflex, and for many projects still the right one. The case for Egypt is more concrete than the cost comparison suggests:

• Time zone. Cairo sits one to two hours from Central Europe depending on the

season. A full working day overlaps — no waiting until tomorrow morning for an answer, as with South Asia.

• Capacity. Egypt graduates engineers in volume, and the market is nowhere

near as tight as Poland or the Czech Republic.

• Language. English is the working language of the industry. German is not —

which is where the real risk lives.

• Price level. Meaningfully below Eastern Europe, which is meaningfully below

Western Europe.

What it actually costs

Guide figures, not quotes. Anyone naming a fixed sum without a requirements document is guessing.

The gap is real. It is also why these engagements fail: buyers who look only at the day rate end up purchasing hours instead of outcomes.

The three risks that matter

1. Who owns the code?

German and much of European copyright law works differently from the American "work for hire" concept — authorship itself does not transfer, usage rights do. Under a contract governed by another jurisdiction, none of those assumptions apply automatically.

State it explicitly: exclusive, perpetual, transferable rights to everything produced, including source code. Without that sentence you may own a licence rather than a product.

2. GDPR and third-country transfer

Egypt has no EU adequacy decision. If the supplier processes personal data, you need Standard Contractual Clauses, a transfer impact assessment and a data processing agreement.

The practical shortcut: keep production data in the EU. Development and maintenance run against anonymised or synthetic data. That removes most of the problem before it exists — and it is better engineering practice regardless.

3. Language and domain knowledge

The biggest risk is neither of the above. It is that your domain knowledge exists in your language and the implementation happens in English.

A developer who does not know what a deferred income entry is will build it wrong, however strong they are technically. In the selection call, do not test frameworks. Test whether someone can summarise your business back to you correctly after twenty minutes.

Nearshoring rarely fails on technical grounds. It fails because nobody described the requirement precisely enough for it to survive crossing a language boundary.

How to set it up properly

1. Start with a paid trial project. Two to four weeks, tightly scoped, with a

real deliverable. It costs less than a bad hire and tells you more than any reference list.

1. Insist on your own repository. Your GitHub, your cloud account, your

credentials. The supplier works inside it, not the other way round.

1. Weekly running software, not a status report. Something you can open and

use yourself.

1. One named counterpart. Not a rotating team, and not an account manager who

never looks at the code.

1. Documentation as an acceptance criterion, not an afterthought.

When nearshoring is the wrong answer

If requirements are not settled and change weekly, distance — geographic and linguistic — is an amplifier, not a saving. Resolve that internally before outsourcing it.

Likewise if the system in question is understood by exactly one person and documented by nobody. Do not hand over knowledge that exists only in someone's head.

Common questions

Do we need someone who speaks our language?

For development, not strictly. For requirements gathering, urgently — or you need someone on your side who can express the domain cleanly in English.

What about the working week and public holidays?

The working week is traditionally Sunday to Thursday, frequently adjusted to Monday to Friday for European clients. Agree it up front, along with holidays — they fall differently.

What happens if we end the engagement?

If point two above was followed: nothing dramatic. The code, the credentials and the documentation are already yours. That is precisely what it is for.