White Label Web Development: How It Works, What It Costs

White label web development means another team builds the work and your agency delivers it under its own name. Your client sees your brand, your project manager and your invoice; the partner works in your tools and stays invisible. For an agency that sells more development than its team can deliver, it turns a capacity problem into a margin question: what you pay the partner versus what you bill the client. With us, a senior developer costs $75 an hour on a strip card, $575 a day on a project or $11,400 a month full-time. This guide explains how the set-up works day to day, what the market charges, how to keep your margin and quality, and how to test a partner before you put a client on the line.

How white label development works in practice

The principle is simple: the client relationship stays yours. In practice, a good set-up looks like this:

• Your tools, not ours. The developer works in your Git repository, your ticketing (Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Trello, whatever you use) and your chat. Tickets, commits and pull requests live where your team already looks.
• Your name everywhere the client can see. No partner logo on deliverables, no partner name in the code, the documentation or the client's admin panel. If the developer needs a client-facing account, it is one under your agency's domain.
• Who talks to the client. Usually your project manager or account lead. The partner briefs and reports to you, and you decide what goes to the client. If a developer needs to join a technical call, our developers join under your agency's name, as part of your team; just agree up front who leads the call.
• Your contract with the client, a separate one with the partner. You invoice the client, the partner invoices you. The client has no contract with the partner.

We work this way for agencies: in your repository, your tools and your chat, under your name. We sign your agency's NDA as standard, and when our developers join a client call, they do so under your agency's name. Your client does not need to know we exist.

Three ways to buy white label development from us

Agencies rarely have one kind of overflow. A client wants a small change this week, another needs a new build next month, and some months the pipeline is simply full. That is why we sell it three ways.

	Strip card	Project days	Dedicated developer
Best for	Overflow and small client requests	A build or integration with a clear goal	A steady pipeline of development work
Price	$1,050 for 14 prepaid hours (about $75/hour)	$575/day senior, $795/day lead	$7,900 medior, $11,400 senior, $15,900 lead per month
Start	Within 24 hours	Usually within one or two weeks	Usually within one or two weeks
Commitment	Hours valid 4 months	No minimum, time and materials	6 months, then 3 months' notice
Reporting	Hours deducted as we work	Weekly progress and hours report	Works in your stand-ups and your team
Who you meet	Our senior developers	You meet the developer before deciding	You meet the developer before deciding
Fits an agency that	Gets unpredictable small tickets from many clients	Sold a website or app it cannot staff	Has more work than its team, every month

Strip card: overflow and small client requests

Fourteen prepaid hours for $1,050. We start within 24 hours, without a quote for each ticket, and deduct the hours as we work. The card is valid for four months. This suits the plugin update, the broken form, the extra landing page: work that is too small to plan and too urgent to wait. Read more on the strip card page.

Project days: builds you sold but cannot staff

A senior developer at $575 a day or a lead developer at $795 a day, on time and materials, with a weekly progress and hours report and no minimum. The lead handles architecture, code review and leads our developers. You meet the developer before you decide, and they usually start within one or two weeks.

Dedicated developer: a steady pipeline

A full-time developer in your team, from $7,900 a month (medior) to $15,900 (lead). Six months minimum, then three months' notice. If the developer is ill or leaves, we replace them fast. They speak Thai, English, Dutch, German or French, so they can fit a team in Europe or in Thailand. See hire a developer for all options.

What white label development costs in the market

There is no official price list for white label work, and most figures online come from vendors who sell it. These are the most useful benchmarks we found:

• Agency rates by country. Clutch, which builds its pricing guide from client reviews, lists web development companies at $100 to $149 an hour in the United States, Canada and Australia, $50 to $99 in Poland, $25 to $49 in the Philippines, Ukraine, Spain and Mexico, and under $25 in India. Across all its reviews, the typical rate is $25 to $49 an hour.
• White label hourly rates. KrishaWeb, a white label provider, publishes ranges of $18 to $45 an hour for senior developers in India, $65 to $90 in Eastern Europe, $75 to $100 in Latin America, $110 to $150 in the UK and Australia and $125 to $300 for US domestic work. It does not say where these figures come from.
• Markup. Vendor guides commonly tell agencies to target a 50 to 70% gross margin on white label work, which means billing the client roughly two to three times the partner's cost.
• What agencies actually make. BenchPress, the UK benchmarking survey for independent agencies run by The Wow Company, found that average gross profit margins for agencies above £1M in revenue fell to 39% in 2024, the lowest on record, against a target of at least 50%.

The gap between the 50 to 70% that vendors promise and the 39% agencies report is the point to take away. A cheap partner hourly rate only becomes margin if the work does not come back. Rework, extra briefing time and a client who notices the quality drop all eat the difference.

An example calculation

Say your agency bills development at $120 an hour and buys strip card hours from us at about $75. That leaves $45 per hour, a gross margin of about 37% before your own project management time. On a project, a senior day at $575 is about $72 an hour over eight hours; a dedicated senior at $11,400 a month is about $71 an hour over 160 hours. Whether that is enough depends on how much of your PM's time each hour of development needs, which is why a partner who needs little hand-holding is worth more than one who is a few dollars cheaper.

How to protect your margin and your quality

White label work fails in two ways: the client notices, or the code turns into a liability you inherit. Both are preventable.

• Code ownership. Put it in writing that the code belongs to you or your client, as your client contract says. With us, the code is yours and we work in your repository, so there is no handover of code at the end: it was never anywhere else.
• NDA. Sign an NDA with the partner that covers your clients' names, data and your pricing, and a non-solicitation clause so the partner does not approach your clients directly. We sign your agency's NDA as standard.
• Code review. Keep pull requests and review in your process. If you have no senior developer in-house, buy a lead's time for review; the lead role on our project days includes code review.
• Your standards. Share your coding standards, linting rules, branch strategy and definition of done on day one. A partner who works in your repo should follow them, not their own.
• Handover and documentation. Ask for a short README or handover note per project, written in your agency's voice, so your team or another developer can take over.
• Access. Give the partner its own accounts, not shared passwords, and remove them when the work ends.

Risks, and how to check a partner

The biggest risks are communication, time zones and quality you cannot see until it is too late. Check each before you put a client project on the line.

Time zones

Our team is in Bangkok, at UTC+7, with no daylight saving time. That is five hours ahead of Central Europe in summer and six in winter, and eleven or twelve hours ahead of New York. For a European agency, the Bangkok afternoon overlaps with your morning: enough for a stand-up, a review or a call, and work you send at the end of your day is often done by the next morning. For US agencies, the overlap is smaller, so agree on fixed hand-off moments and written updates.

Communication

Ask who your contact person is, how fast they answer in your chat, and how they report progress and hours. A partner that only reports when asked is a partner you will have to chase.

A small paid test task

The most reliable check is a real ticket. Give the partner a small, paid task from your backlog: a bug, a component, an integration that takes one or two days. Then look at the pull request, the commit messages, the questions they asked and how close the result is to your standards. A strip card is made for exactly this: 14 hours, no long contract.

Other questions to ask

1. Will you work in our repository, ticketing and chat, under our name?
2. Who owns the code, and is that in the contract?
3. What happens if the developer is ill or leaves halfway through a client project?
4. Can I meet the developer before we start?
5. How do I see the hours spent, and how often?

For a longer list, read our checklist for choosing an outsourcing partner, and for the background on working with a team in Thailand, outsourcing software development to Thailand.

How to decide

• Small, unpredictable requests from many clients: a strip card. Buy a new one when the hours run out.
• You sold a build you cannot staff: project days, with a lead developer if you need architecture and review.
• More development work than your team, every month: a dedicated developer who joins your stand-ups.
• Not sure yet: start with a strip card as a paid test, then move to project days or a dedicated developer once you trust the work.

Before you quote a client for work on an existing site, run it through EngineeringScore, our free audit of security, performance, SEO, accessibility and reliability. It gives you and your partner the same starting point, and often a list of billable work.

Take on more work without hiring

Tell us about your agency: the stacks you build in, the kind of client requests that pile up and how much work you expect each month. We suggest the best way to start, you meet the developer, and they get to work in your tools under your name. Start on our page for agencies, or go straight to the strip card or hire a developer.