For clients in the US, UK & Australia
The questions you are too polite to ask.
You are considering a studio eight thousand miles away. Here is everything you would otherwise have to find out the hard way.
Halt Designs works from Karachi with clients in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Contracts are governed by the client's own jurisdiction, intellectual property is assigned in writing on final payment, and invoicing is milestone-based in USD, GBP or AUD rather than a single large deposit.
Hours
We work inside your day, not after it.
Karachi is UTC+5. That is a better hand than it sounds, and we staff around the gaps rather than pretending they do not exist.
Karachi mornings cover the US East Coast working day to 12pm ET. We also hold a late shift to 9pm PKT for West Coast calls.
Four hours of overlap every day: our afternoon is your morning. Most UK clients get a same-morning reply.
Karachi afternoons are the Australian evening; Karachi mornings cover the full AEST working day.
Standing calls are booked in your time zone and stay there. We do not ask a client in Sydney to take a 6am meeting because it suits us.
Terms
Written down before you pay anything.
- Your jurisdiction. The contract can be governed by the law of your state, England and Wales, or your Australian state. You are not agreeing to litigate in Sindh.
- IP assigned in writing. All code, designs and assets transfer to you on final payment. The repository comes with them.
- Milestone payments. Thirty percent to begin, staged payments against agreed deliverables, balance on handover. No large up-front deposit against nothing.
- NDA on request, signed before the first detailed conversation if you prefer.
- Invoiced in your currency — USD, GBP or AUD — by bank transfer or Wise.
- GDPR and data handling addressed in the contract for UK and EU clients, including a data processing agreement where we touch personal data.
Honest limits
What working with us is not.
We are not the cheapest option available to you, and if price is the only variable you are optimizing, there is a marketplace full of studios that will beat our number. They will also assign your work to whoever is free that week.
We are not an extension of your team on a daily-standup basis. We work in defined phases against a written scope, which suits a project with an outcome and suits ongoing staff augmentation poorly.
And we will tell you when you do not need us. If a Shopify theme and a good photographer serve you better than a custom build, that is the advice you will get on the first call, at no charge.
Common questions
Hiring across borders.
Is it safe to hire a web development company overseas?
The risk in offshore development is almost never technical skill — it is accountability. Ask for a contract governed by your own jurisdiction, written IP assignment on payment, milestone-based payments rather than a large deposit, and direct access to the engineers rather than an account manager. We offer all four as standard.
Will I be talking to the people writing the code?
Yes. There is no account management layer. The engineer who scoped your project is the one who builds it and the one who answers your email in year three.
What happens if the project goes wrong?
Milestone payments mean you are never more than one phase exposed. If we stop at the end of any phase, you keep everything produced to that point, including the code and the specification. There is no scenario where you have paid for work you cannot take elsewhere.
Do you sign NDAs?
Yes, before the first detailed conversation if you prefer. Send yours or use ours.
How do I know the work is progressing?
You get a staging URL in week one and it updates as we build. There is no black box between kickoff and reveal — you watch the site fill in.
Still want to test us before committing?
Start with a paid discovery phase. You get a written specification and a fixed price, and you own it whether or not we build the thing.
Start with discovery