India (IST, UTC+5:30) doesn't overlap with US Pacific or Eastern business hours by default — the honest fix is a team that works async-first and schedules calls in your afternoon, which lands in India's evening. If a studio can't name a specific overlap window before you sign, that's a red flag, not a detail to work out later.
Ask what a normal week of communication looks like: written daily or weekly updates, a shared staging link, and a standing call — not just "we'll Slack you."
Three engagement models cover most US-India hiring: a fixed-scope project for a defined MVP or feature set, a monthly retainer for ongoing product work, or staff augmentation where an engineer joins your existing sprint process. Open-ended hourly billing with no defined deliverable is the model most likely to run over budget.
You should own the repository, CI/CD, and cloud accounts from day one, and be able to sign an NDA before the first discovery call. If a vendor is vague about either, that's worth pausing on before any contract is signed.
