"I've heard that India is not really low cost anymore."
This is not completely true. If you are trying to outsource to companies, sure it is getting more expensive all the time. They have to pay legions of useless managers / "process control" (think ISO 9000) people from the money the programmers earn.
If you have interesting work, you can get good programmers at 25-50 $/hr. You could get work done on a fixed fee basis as well (which is what I would reccomend). 10 - 20 k$ would get you a lot of code (assuming you found good people in the first place).
A lot of people would like to work from home on decent projects vs being at the mercy of the outsourcing companies where you have little control over what technology/projects you work on. The sheer size of the country's outsourcing industry obscures the fact that there are a lot of good programmers who would want to work on more flexible terms, especially for startups. In that sense, India is still very much unexplored territory.
This is not completely true. If you are trying to outsource to companies, sure it is getting more expensive all the time. They have to pay legions of useless managers / "process control" (think ISO 9000) people from the money the programmers earn.
If you have interesting work, you can get good programmers at 25-50 $/hr. You could get work done on a fixed fee basis as well (which is what I would reccomend). 10 - 20 k$ would get you a lot of code (assuming you found good people in the first place).
A lot of people would like to work from home on decent projects vs being at the mercy of the outsourcing companies where you have little control over what technology/projects you work on. The sheer size of the country's outsourcing industry obscures the fact that there are a lot of good programmers who would want to work on more flexible terms, especially for startups. In that sense, India is still very much unexplored territory.