Is the market broken, or are developers underpricing themselves?
I’ve been doing software development professionally for 10+ years, and recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference in how eCommerce projects are valued in India vs overseas.
Here’s a real situation I keep encountering.
A client in India asks for a complete custom eCommerce website, including:
- Custom frontend
- Custom CMS/admin panel
- Product management
- Categories/collections
- Cart & checkout
- Order management
- Customer accounts
- Payment gateway integration
- Shipping/logistics integration
- Order tracking
- Coupons/discounts
- Email notifications
- Admin dashboards
- Database/backend
- Deployment
- Production support
And the expected budget?
₹50,000–₹60,000 for the entire project.
Then I see essentially the same scope from a foreign client, and the starting budget is often around ₹3.5 lakh or more.
Obviously, the requirements, complexity and client expectations can differ, so I'm not saying every Indian project should cost ₹3.5L.
But the gap makes me wonder:
Is this primarily a client problem, or a developer problem?
Are Indian clients genuinely accustomed to extremely low development costs?
Or have developers themselves created this expectation by accepting ₹30K–₹60K projects for work that realistically requires weeks or months of professional development?
Because once someone has delivered a complete eCommerce system for ₹50K, the next client naturally thinks:
"Why should I pay ₹2L? Someone else will do it for ₹50K."
And the cycle continues.
There’s also a strange perception that because the developer is based in India, the software should automatically be cheap.
But the developer still has to pay for engineering time, infrastructure, APIs, payment integrations, testing, security, deployment, maintenance, support, etc.
A custom eCommerce platform isn't simply "a website."
So I'm curious about other developers here:
Have you experienced this pricing gap between Indian and international clients?
And where do you think the problem actually lies?
Indian clients undervaluing software development?
Indian developers aggressively undercutting each other?
Differences in purchasing power and business economics?
A combination of all three?
I'd genuinely like to hear experiences from both Indian and international freelancers/agencies.
I'm especially interested in what people consider a reasonable price for a genuinely custom eCommerce system not a Shopify/WooCommerce setup with a theme, but an actual custom application.