It is the first question every buyer asks and the one most development companies answer with a shrug and a discovery call. So here are the actual numbers. Rate surveys published across the Indian market in 2026 put junior developers (two to three years) at roughly $14-25 per hour depending on stack, mid-level engineers (three to six years) at $20-38, and senior engineers at $32-58. Full-stack sits at the upper end of each band. Specialists carry a premium: developers with production AI and LLM integration experience are commanding 25-40% above the equivalent general rate, which currently makes it the fastest-appreciating skill in the Indian market.
Expressed as a monthly retainer at roughly 160 hours, that works out to about $2,400-3,500 for a junior, $3,500-5,500 for a mid-level engineer, and $5,500-9,000 for a senior. Those are the numbers you can sanity-check any proposal against.
Now the more useful point: the hourly rate is close to the least predictive number in the whole equation. A team of ten juniors at $20 an hour costs more per month than four seniors at $45, and on anything involving architectural judgement it will usually deliver less, slower, and leave behind a codebase that costs more to change. What you are actually buying is decisions per hour, not hours. When you compare two quotes, compare the seniority mix and who is making the architectural calls, not the headline rate.
Four things genuinely move the number. Scope clarity is the largest: a project with a written, agreed definition of done costs meaningfully less than the same project described in a conversation, because the difference gets paid for in rework. Integration surface is second - every external system you must talk to adds cost that has nothing to do with your own features, and legacy systems without documentation add more. Compliance is third; building to SOC 2, HIPAA or India's DPDP requirements is not a feature you add later, it is a constraint on how everything gets built. And data quality is fourth, particularly on anything involving analytics or AI, where teams routinely discover that the expensive part was never the model.
Engagements generally take one of three shapes, and picking the wrong one is expensive. Fixed-scope works when the requirements genuinely are fixed - a well-understood integration, a defined migration - and it transfers risk to the vendor, who prices that risk in. Time-and-materials suits work where the destination is clear but the route is not, which describes most product development honestly assessed. A dedicated team model makes sense once the work is continuous rather than a project, and it is usually the cheapest per unit of output because nobody is re-learning your domain every quarter.
Budget for the things that never appear in the headline quote: a discovery phase that produces something you could hand to a different vendor, non-production environments, an automated test suite, and support after launch. That last one catches people out. Software does not finish at go-live - dependencies age, certificates expire, and the traffic pattern shifts. A proposal that says nothing about what happens in month four is not cheaper, it is incomplete.
One note specific to Bengaluru. Rates here run above tier-two Indian cities, and the honest reason is supply and demand for senior people - the depth of engineers who have actually operated systems at scale is concentrated here, and that is what the premium buys. If your project is straightforward execution against a clear spec, that premium may not be worth paying. If it involves architecture you cannot afford to get wrong, it usually is.
