4–8 hours of same-day overlap and easier travel — worth its premium for highly interactive work: pairing-heavy teams, fast-iterating product discovery.
Deeper savings and, with mature partners, follow-the-sun delivery — the question to ask isn't 'where' but 'show me your US-hours ceremony coverage and response SLAs.'
Weekly demos, written decisions, async-first documentation, and overlap windows for the collaborative hours — the delivery discipline that makes either model work, and whose absence sinks both.
Trial project with your actual ceremonies: did communication feel present-tense? Latency of answers, not miles, is the metric.
Skipping the discipline this article describes until an incident, audit, or stalled project forces it — every practice above is cheaper adopted early than retrofitted under pressure.
Let's discuss how we can help you with nearshore vs offshore.