US small and mid-sized businesses usually get two quotes: a domestic agency they cannot justify, and an offshore shop they do not trust. We sit between them — a Thailand-registered company with operations in Japan, offshore cost structure, one accountable architect per project, and software already running in over 10,000 retail stores.
If you run a business in the United States and you need software built, you have almost certainly priced this two ways. A US or Canadian agency will quote you a number that makes sense for a venture-funded company and no sense at all for a profitable twelve-person operation. An offshore shop found through a marketplace will quote you a fraction of it, and everyone you ask will tell you a horror story about the last time they tried that.
Both reactions are rational. The offshore horror stories are real, and they almost never have anything to do with the hourly rate. They happen because nobody senior owned the architecture. A rotating pool of junior developers built something that demonstrated beautifully on a call and then fell over the first time real customers, real payment retries, and real network failures hit it. Nobody could explain why, because the person who wrote that part had been rotated onto another account two months earlier.
We are structured to remove that failure mode rather than to price around it. Alienstacks is a Thailand-registered company (DBD Reg. No. 0395569000469) headquartered in Bang Na, Bangkok, with operations in Tokyo. We build and operate our own products, which means we carry pager duty for our own architecture decisions. We are not a staffing agency selling hours, and we do not grow by adding junior seats. One senior architect owns your project end to end and is on the call every time.
We already work with clients and run operations across the United States, Germany, China, Japan, Thailand, and Bangladesh — so US contracting, US-jurisdiction agreements, and American working expectations are familiar ground rather than a first attempt.
Any offshore vendor who tells a US client that the timezone “is not a problem” is either lying or planning to keep engineers awake at 3:00 AM until they quit. Bangkok is about eleven hours ahead of US Eastern and fourteen ahead of US Pacific. That is a genuine constraint. Here is exactly how we run inside it.
7:00–10:00 PM Bangkok is 8:00–11:00 AM Eastern and 5:00–8:00 AM Pacific. That window is protected for US clients. Two fixed live calls per week sit inside it, plus availability for anything urgent. Our Tokyo side extends the window by two hours for East Coast mornings.
At the end of our day — your early morning — you get a written update in Slack or email: what shipped, what is in review, what is blocked, and any decision waiting on you. You reply during your day; we act on it before your next morning. The gap becomes an overnight build cycle instead of a delay.
No account manager relaying questions to a pool you never meet. The person who designed your data model is the person on your call and the person who answers when something breaks in production eight months later.
Our US work clusters around operational software — the systems that run a business rather than the ones that market it. A few patterns we see repeatedly:
The relevant services are iOS app development, Android app development, and cross-platform app development for mobile; web application development for portals and platforms; POS and payment systems for retail and hospitality; and AI development for automation. The full list is on our services overview.
We are not the right answer for every US business, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours. Here is a fair reading of the three options in front of you.
Full timezone overlap, in-person workshops, domestic contracts, and someone you can sue easily. If your project is regulation-heavy, needs constant on-site presence, or is funded well enough that cost is not the binding constraint, this is often the right call.
Trade-off: substantially higher cost for the same scope, and many US agencies subcontract the engineering offshore anyway without telling you.
Offshore cost structure with one senior architect who owns the design, plus production evidence at a scale most agencies of any price cannot show: POS software in over 10,000 stores handling more than $50M a year, AI in use at 200+ firms.
Trade-off: a real timezone gap, managed with overlap hours and written updates rather than wished away. And we take on a limited number of engagements, so we are not always available immediately.
Cheapest per hour, fast to start, and genuinely fine for well-specified, low-risk work: a marketing site, a simple internal tool, a prototype you intend to throw away.
Trade-off: usually no senior architectural ownership. The code works in the demo and struggles in production, and the rebuild often costs more than doing it once properly.
We do not publish a price, because a number without a scope is marketing rather than information. What moves the figure, in rough order of impact: how many distinct user roles the system has (one is cheap, four is not); whether money moves through it, since payments, refunds, and reconciliation carry a compliance and testing burden ordinary CRUD does not; how many external systems you need integrated, and whether they are documented; whether the product must keep working offline; and whether we are building from scratch or repairing something already in production, where the discovery work is unavoidable.
A single-platform mobile app with one user role and no payments sits at the low end of our range. A multi-location POS platform with hardware, payment rails, and offline sync sits at the high end and takes months, not weeks. We will tell you which end you are at on the first call, before you have spent anything.
Every vendor claims senior engineers. The difference is whether they can show you production systems. Three of our products are live and open — no signup, no sales call — and our case studies document the architecture behind the client work, including the parts we would do differently.
Offline-first sync, multi-tenant isolation, and payment hardware abstraction across more than 10,000 retail stores processing $50M+ a year. The scale baseline behind everything else we build.
An AI pipeline for a Japanese manufacturer that reads incoming spec documents and returns a complete quote in under a minute, with every decision logged and low-confidence cases routed to a human.
An executive dashboard built from the files a business already produces — cash runway, department profitability, and a scenario simulator, with every figure traceable to its source document.
Two more live products worth clicking: JP Accounting Suite, the AI workflow platform behind our 200+ Japanese accounting firms, and Virtual Office, a workspace of AI agents you can hire like staff. For US-relevant client work, the AssetXtoken PropTech platform covers regulated fractional-ownership flows and payments, and Bhalogari covers multi-currency marketplace settlement — the two areas where US builds most often run into trouble after launch.
The first step is a thirty-minute call in your morning, our evening. We sign a mutual NDA first if you want one. You describe the business problem; we tell you whether software is the right answer, roughly what it involves, and whether we are the right team — we turn down work that is a poor fit rather than take a deposit and find out later. If there is a fit, we scope a small paid first milestone with a working deployed artefact at the end of it, so your risk on the relationship stays small until we have earned more.
If you already have a codebase from another vendor, ask about the architecture review instead. Two to five days, a plain-English report on what is salvageable, and no obligation to build with us afterwards.
Honestly: there is a gap, and we do not pretend otherwise. Bangkok is roughly 11 hours ahead of US Eastern and 14 hours ahead of US Pacific. In practice that gives us a real overlap window every working day — our evening, 7:00 to 10:00 PM Bangkok time, is 8:00 to 11:00 AM Eastern and 5:00 to 8:00 AM Pacific. We hold two fixed live calls a week inside that window and keep the rest asynchronous: a written end-of-day update in your channel every working day, so you read progress with your morning coffee and reply before we start. The practical effect is that decisions you make during your day are picked up while you sleep and answered by the time you are back at your desk.
You do, outright, including the repository, the infrastructure accounts, the CI configuration, and the deployment credentials. We work in your GitHub organisation or hand over a full repository transfer at the end of every milestone, not just at the end of the project. There is no proprietary framework you have to license from us afterwards and no runtime dependency on Alienstacks. If you decide after three months to take the codebase to another team, you can, and we will do a documented handover call.
Yes. We routinely sign mutual NDAs before a discovery call, and we are comfortable contracting under Delaware, New York, or California law, with US-state venue for disputes. Alienstacks Co., Ltd. is a Thailand-registered company (DBD Reg. No. 0395569000469), which means you are contracting with a real registered legal entity rather than a group of freelancers — we can provide registration documents, a certified English translation, and a W-8BEN-E for your accounts payable process.
We invoice in USD against milestones, and receive payment by international wire or a USD-denominated transfer service. Because we are a registered company rather than individual contractors, you receive a proper commercial invoice with our registration number on it, which is what your bookkeeper needs. As a foreign entity with no US permanent establishment we file a W-8BEN-E with you; software development services performed outside the United States are generally not subject to US withholding, but confirm the treatment with your own CPA rather than taking our word for it.
This is the most common way US clients reach us, and it is work we take seriously rather than reluctantly. We start with a paid architecture review of two to five days: we clone the repository, get it running, read the data model, check what tests exist, look at how secrets and payments are handled, and write you a plain-English report on what is salvageable and what is not. Sometimes the answer is that the front end is fine and the data model needs rebuilding. Sometimes the honest answer is that a rewrite is cheaper than the repair. We tell you which before you commit to a build, and the review is useful to you even if you hire someone else.
Because the thing that failed last time was almost certainly not the hourly rate — it was the absence of one senior person who owned the architecture. Cheap shops assign a rotating pool of junior developers and route your questions through an account manager. We assign one architect who stays on your project from the first call to production, and who can explain any decision in the codebase. We also operate our own products in production, so we live with the consequences of bad architecture in a way a body shop selling hours never does. Judge us on the evidence: software running in over 10,000 retail stores, AI systems in daily use at more than 200 Japanese firms, and three products you can open and click through right now without asking us for a demo.
A thirty-minute call in your morning, our evening. An honest answer on scope, timeline, and fit — and an NDA first if you want one.