<rant> Something being missed by this discussion (and many offshoring discussions) is that many consulting firms design maintenance costs into their business mo

<rant> Something being missed by this discussion (and many offshoring discussions) is that many consulting firms design maintenance costs into their business model. They undercut everyone with low prices for a poorly engineered product, knowing they can churn additional hours/sales in "upgrades", "maintenance" etc. When you pay me $60 an hour (or more) to design you a component of your system, it will be SOLID OO designs, quite reusable, DRY, tested (unit tested) and better in many other ways. Where as most of the code I've seen come from bad agencies basically do "class Main { function doItAll() { /* Here is the entire program */ } };" Which is why it will cost more in the long run. If you want something added or made similar, they'll copy and paste instead of inheriting or using traits or other language constructs to keep it DRY. If you want to know if the system has regression, they'll shrug, because they either do not test, or they just write the tests to pass the way the code currently works, not testing the component in general. If you're planning on closing business in 12 months, then maybe its not worth it to invest in a scalable, changeable infrastructure. If you're planning on being in business for a long time, then invest the capital to develop your business :D . ok </rant>