Working with an overseas web agency: contracts, time zones and who owns the code

The technical conversation is usually the easy one. What stalls a deal between a business in Chicago, Toronto or Manchester and an agency on another continent is everything around it: which country's law applies, how invoices get paid, who owns what at the end, and who picks up the phone when the site goes down on a Saturday.

These are the answers we give, and what we would insist on if we were buying rather than selling.

The contract

• Governing law and jurisdiction. Pick one and write it down. Many of our contracts are governed by the client's own jurisdiction; that is normal and worth asking for.
• Scope, in a schedule. Deliverables, revision rounds, what is explicitly excluded. Disputes are almost always about the excluded list nobody wrote.
• Payment schedule tied to delivery, not to the calendar. Milestones you can see keep both sides honest.
• Termination. What notice, what happens to work in progress, and what is handed over. Agree it while everyone is friendly.

Who owns the code

Insist on written assignment of intellectual property on payment, covering source code, design files and content. Then make ownership practical rather than theoretical: the repository under your organisation account, the domain in your registrar account, hosting and analytics in accounts you control with the agency invited, not the reverse. An agency that resists this is telling you something.

Licensed third-party components — a theme, a plugin, a stock photo — belong in a list with their licences, so a future developer inherits a project rather than a puzzle.

Invoicing and tax

Agree the currency and who absorbs conversion and wire fees. For UK and EU clients, establish early whether the reverse charge applies to services bought from outside; for US clients, ask the agency for the right tax form for a foreign contractor before the first payment, not at year end. None of this is difficult, but it is slow if it starts after the work does. We invoice in USD, GBP, CAD or AED, and we are used to both sides' paperwork.

Time zones, honestly

Pakistan is roughly nine to twelve hours ahead of North America and four to five ahead of the UK. That is an advantage if you use it and a frustration if you ignore it. What works:

• A fixed overlap window agreed in writing — ours typically covers UK afternoons and US mornings.
• Written-first communication. Decisions in a shared thread, not only in calls, so the next working day starts with an answer rather than a question.
• Overnight as a feature. Feedback at the end of your day, work waiting when you start the next. Two weeks of that is meaningfully faster than same-timezone ping-pong.
• A named escalation path for genuine emergencies, with a response time, in your hours.

Data, privacy and security

Ask where data is stored and processed, who has production access, how credentials are shared, and what happens to backups after the contract ends. If you handle UK or EU personal data, get the processing terms in writing; if you handle health or payment data, ask before, not after. We wrote a practical companion piece on the website side of this: forms, cookies and consent.

What happens if it goes wrong

Ask three questions before you sign. Who fixes a critical bug found six months after launch, and at what cost? If we part company, what exactly do we receive, and in what format? And can you give me a reference from a client in my region? A team with international clients will have one — ours include a car-shipping platform for Canada and the USA and a payments website in Brazil.

The underlying rule is the same everywhere: pay for outcomes, own your assets, and write down the boring parts. If that is how you like to work, tell us about the project. Deciding between local and offshore in the first place? Start with hiring an offshore development team.