Web development company for San Francisco businesses
San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area represent the most expensive development market in the world. Mid-level engineers at established companies earn USD 180,000 to 250,000 per year, and senior AI or distributed systems engineers regularly earn more. Codalyst Tech builds websites and web applications for San Francisco startups and companies at a fixed USD price, on a written scope, with full code ownership transferred on completion.
At a glance
Fixed-price agreement · IP fully assigned · NDA on request
Local market
Building at SF rates versus building at Pakistan rates
San Francisco's development cost structure is in a category of its own. A senior engineer at a Bay Area product company costs USD 200,000 to 300,000 per year in total compensation, and for early-stage founders or mid-market companies that have not raised significant capital, that makes a local hire on anything non-core a straightforward ROI decision.
The pattern we see most often is a company with a strong internal engineering team focused on core product, and a set of surrounding needs that do not justify expanding that team: a marketing site rebuild, a partner-facing portal, an internal admin tool, an integration layer, or a standalone microservice. These are well-scoped, deliverable-defined projects. They do not need Bay Area rates.
The other pattern is a funded startup that has capital but not yet a full team. The choice between one San Francisco engineer at USD 200,000 or two Pakistan-based engineers under a company contract at a fraction of that cost, on a defined deliverable, is not a difficult calculation. The risk is different, and we work to reduce it: fixed scope, written before work starts, full IP assigned, no lock-in.
What we will not do is take a vague brief. If the scope is 'build our product', we scope it properly with you before quoting, or tell you it needs a product discovery phase first.
Why offshore
- Fixed scope, fixed price, written before work starts
- Company contract and NDA — not a freelancer arrangement
- IP fully assigned to you on final payment
- 70–85% below local agency rates
- Proposal and cost estimate within 24 hours
Working hours
Working with San Francisco hours
Timezone
PST / PDT
UTC-8 (UTC-7 during daylight saving)
Overlap window
Async overnight; standups 7–9pm PST (early PKT morning)
PKT working window
7:00am to 9:00am PKT
San Francisco runs PST (UTC-8) in winter and PDT (UTC-7) from March to November. Pakistan Standard Time is UTC+5 year-round. The gap is 13 hours in winter and 12 in summer, the widest of any market we serve in the US. There is no live overlap during normal business hours on either side. The model that works at this gap is async-first by design. Our team in Pakistan runs a complete working day while San Francisco is overnight. Code is reviewed, tested, committed, and staged. A 4pm message in San Francisco reaches us in our morning and is answered before your 9am. The daily delivery loop is tight. Most of our SF clients find the rhythm settles within the first week. For urgent reviews, we make an early PKT slot available from 7am to 9am PKT (6pm to 8pm PST) for live calls when needed.
Industry context
Industries we serve in San Francisco
SaaS and product companies
Bay Area SaaS companies are the most common source of the work we do for US clients: a defined deliverable adjacent to core product engineering. Marketing sites, onboarding flows, admin dashboards, integration layers, and partner portals all fit this pattern. The internal team stays on core product. We take the well-scoped surrounding work.
AI and LLM startups
San Francisco has the largest concentration of AI and LLM startups in the world, and many of them need web infrastructure that their ML team should not be building: user-facing interfaces, evaluation dashboards, customer-facing portals, and admin tooling. We build these in Next.js and TypeScript to a standard the internal team can take over without a rewrite.
Climate technology
SF and the broader Bay Area produce a large share of US climate tech investment. Grid software, carbon accounting platforms, battery management interfaces, and sustainability reporting tools all need reliable web front-ends and dashboards built at a cost that preserves runway. The build requirement is often data-heavy with integration complexity, which is where a properly scoped project pays back.
Pricing in USD
What it costs
Marketing site or landing build
From USD 2,500
3 to 4 weeks
Standard multi-page site with CMS
USD 2,500 to 7,000
4 to 8 weeks
Web application or product build
USD 5,000 to 15,000
8 to 16 weeks
In-house build
Analytica and Orbit CRM
No named San Francisco client yet. Our in-house builds include Analytica, a business analytics dashboard built in Next.js with real-time data visualisation, and Orbit CRM, a multi-pipeline client management platform. Both are available as working demos and represent the type of data-facing web application common in the Bay Area SaaS context.
View build detailsStart a project
Describe what you need. We will scope it and send a fixed-price proposal within 24 hours. No retainer required at this stage.
Get free estimateSend us a briefAlternative model
Need ongoing capacity rather than a project?
The services above deliver fixed-scope project work. If you need a dedicated developer working alongside your San Francisco team on an ongoing monthly basis, the hire-developers model is the right fit.
Frequently asked questions
- Can a San Francisco startup work with an offshore team on an equity-sensitive product?
- Yes, and the arrangement is common. We provide a formal company-to-company contract with NDA, IP assignment, and confidentiality terms that your counsel can review. The work you give us is defined by scope, not access: we receive a brief, we build to it, and the result and all IP transfers to you. We do not receive equity, we are not treated as employees, and the engagement structure is clean for investor reporting.
- Does the PST timezone make daily standups impossible?
- Not impossible, but we design around the gap. We maintain an early PKT slot from 7am to 9am PKT (6pm to 8pm PST) for live calls when needed. The primary model is async: a 4pm message in San Francisco reaches us in our morning. Most teams settle into a rhythm where the standup is a written async update rather than a call, which is faster anyway.
- How do you handle an unscoped or early-stage brief?
- We scope it before we quote. If your brief is more product vision than specification, we will run a scoping session with you to define what we are actually building, what it will not do in v1, and what the dependencies are. We would rather spend two hours on scope than deliver the wrong thing at fixed price.
- We already have a design system in Figma. Can you build to it?
- Yes, and builds against a supplied design system are usually faster and cheaper. We review the Figma, flag anything that will cause problems in build or performance, and quote against the actual scope. Design-to-code builds also tend to have fewer revision cycles because the visual decisions are already made.
- Who owns the code and can our internal team take it over?
- You own everything, including the IP, from final payment. You receive the repository with full documentation, and we build in Next.js and TypeScript precisely so that any competent Bay Area engineer can take over the codebase without needing us to explain it. There is no proprietary layer and no dependency on our continued involvement.
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