Three months ago, James was proud of his lean operation. His London-based SaaS company had cracked the code on staying agile: hire contractors as needed, scale up for big projects, scale down when things were quiet. No overhead, no long-term commitments, maximum flexibility.

Then he saw his competitor's product roadmap.

They'd shipped more features in Q2 than his team had delivered all year. Their latest release included functionality he'd been planning for months but couldn't find the right contractor to build. Worse, their engineers seemed to understand the product deeply—every feature felt cohesive, intentional, like it was built by people who actually cared.

How were they moving so fast?

James reached out to their CTO through a mutual connection. The answer surprised him.

"We stopped hiring contractors eighteen months ago," she said. "Built a dedicated offshore team instead. Same people, every sprint. They're not mercenaries hopping between gigs—they're part of our company."

James felt his stomach drop. While he'd been congratulating himself on staying flexible, his competitor had been building institutional knowledge, momentum, and speed he couldn't match.

The contractor trap you don't see until it's too late

On paper, contractors make perfect sense. You pay for exactly what you need. No benefits, no long-term salaries, no risk if things don't work out. It feels smart, efficient, lean.

But here's what that model actually costs you:

Every project starts from zero. New contractor, new onboarding, new explanations of your architecture, your business logic, your quality standards. By the time they're productive, the project's half over.

No one owns outcomes. Contractors deliver their piece and move on. When bugs surface three months later, they're gone. When the feature needs iteration, you're explaining everything to someone new.

Your roadmap moves at a crawl. While you're interviewing, onboarding, and ramping up contractors, your competitors with dedicated teams are shipping. Every hiring cycle is a delay your rivals don't have.

Knowledge walks out the door. That brilliant solution your last contractor built? Good luck modifying it when they're unavailable. The context, the reasoning, the clever workarounds—all gone.

Quality is a gamble every time. Great contractor this quarter, mediocre one next quarter, disaster the quarter after. You're constantly rolling the dice instead of building on what works.

Your competitors figured this out. They're not smarter than you. They just stopped accepting these trade-offs.

USoftware Unfiltered

Most podcasts about software development outsourcing are thinly veiled sales pitches. Polished executives reciting talking points. Carefully edited success stories that conveniently skip the messy parts. Everyone pretending outsourcing is simple, risk-free, and guaranteed to work if you just hire their company.

USoftware Unfiltered is the opposite of that.

This is where we say the things outsourcing companies aren't supposed to admit. Where we talk about the projects that failed, the clients we couldn't help, and the uncomfortable truths about offshore development that make everyone in the industry squirm.

No scripts. No corporate polish. Just honest conversations about what actually happens when UK and US businesses try to scale development by working with offshore teams—the spectacular wins, the expensive disasters, and everything in between.

Who this is for

You're a CTO, founder, or engineering leader at a UK or US company that's considering outsourcing, currently outsourcing, or recovering from an outsourcing disaster.

You're skeptical. You've heard the horror stories. Maybe you've lived them. You're not looking for someone to tell you outsourcing is magical—you want someone to tell you the truth about when it works, when it doesn't, and how to tell the difference.

You're tired of marketing disguised as insight. You can spot a sales pitch from three sentences away, and you're done wasting time on content that's just trying to book a demo call.

You want to make better decisions. Not perfect ones—those don't exist. Just better ones, informed by reality instead of whatever narrative vendors are selling this quarter.

Start with the hard questions

Browse the episodes at unfiltered.usoftware.co. Pick the topic that's keeping you up at night. Listen to a conversation that doesn't insult your intelligence or waste your time.

No fluff. No corporate speak. No pretending outsourcing is simple when it's not.

Just the unfiltered truth about software development outsourcing—the wins, the losses, and the lessons that actually matter.

Because you're not looking for easy answers. You're looking for honest ones.