The 9 Best Software Developers in Tbilisi

Directory listings put most Tbilisi teams in the 25 to 50 USD per hour band, with senior-only or foreign-parented firms closer to 50 to 99 USD. Published minimum project sizes cluster at 10,000 USD for smaller shops and 25,000 to 50,000 USD for the larger ones. In practice a focused internal tool or a first version of a product usually lands somewhere between 15,000 and 45,000 USD, and anything with payments, third-party integrations and a compliance angle runs well past 100,000. Treat all of that as directory bands rather than quotes, because every firm reprices on scope and on how senior the team needs to be. Ask for a rate card by role before you compare two proposals.

Per hour, yes, usually by a wide margin. A good mid-level Georgian engineer hired directly costs a fraction of the same person billed through an agency, because the agency is carrying recruitment, management, cover and profit. The catch is that you become the technical manager, the recruiter and the person who owns the risk when someone quits mid-sprint. Direct hiring works if you already have a technical lead who can interview and review code. If you do not, the agency margin is buying you exactly the thing you lack.

No. Every firm on this list invoices foreign entities and several of them contract through a non-Georgian parent, which removes the question entirely. You would want a Georgian company for other reasons, such as taking Georgian revenue, employing people locally, or holding Virtual Zone or International Company status for your own IT income. If you are registering anyway, doing it before the build starts is simpler, because the developer contract, the IP assignment and the bank account then all sit under the same entity from day one.

Under Georgian law the default position on a contractor relationship is not automatically in your favour, so the assignment has to be written down. Put an explicit IP assignment clause in the contract covering source code, designs, and anything generated during the engagement, and make it survive termination. Insist that all work is committed to a repository you own, not one belonging to the agency, from the first day rather than at handover. Ask for infrastructure and domain accounts to be created in your name too. This is the single most common thing foreign founders get wrong here and it only becomes visible when the relationship ends badly.

Fixed price works when the scope is genuinely closed, such as an integration with a defined API or a rebuild of something that already exists. For anything exploratory it pushes the firm to defend the original spec instead of building the right thing, and you pay for that in change requests. Time and materials with a capped monthly budget and a two-week review cycle is the usual compromise, and it is what most of the firms here default to. Whichever you pick, agree in writing what counts as a change request before the first invoice arrives.

Check the company in the public registry at napr.gov.ge using the name on their invoice, and see whether the registered entity matches the brand on the website. Ask to speak to the engineers who would actually be assigned, not the account manager, and ask them to walk you through a past codebase decision. Ask for two client references you can email directly. Then look at the boring signals, which is how this list dropped two firms, including an expired TLS certificate on their own site and a domain that no longer resolves at all. A development shop that cannot keep its own website up is telling you something.