How hours, prices and contracts work with a nearshore team in Moldova

If you're thinking about a development team in Moldova, three practical questions come before any talk about code. When will we be online at the same time? How is the work priced and paid? And what does the contract say about the code and your data?

This post answers all three for the way we work at XLITE, a three-person team in Cahul, Moldova, that builds with Laravel and Filament (the Laravel toolkit for admin panels). Moldova has been an EU candidate country since June 2022, but it isn't an EU member yet. That matters in two places below: VAT and personal data.

Moldova is one hour ahead of Berlin, all year

Moldova runs on Eastern European Time: UTC+2 in winter and UTC+3 in summer. The clocks change on the same weekends and at the same moment as in the EU, on the last Sunday of March and of October. So the gap to the EU and the UK stays the same all year.

You are in	Moldova is	Your 10:00 is our
London, Dublin, Lisbon	2 hours ahead	12:00
Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid	1 hour ahead	11:00
New York	7 hours ahead	17:00
San Francisco	10 hours ahead	20:00

The US changes its clocks on different dates, the second Sunday of March and the first Sunday of November. For two or three weeks in March, and for the last week of October, the gap to the US is one hour shorter.

With Western Europe, you share the whole working day. A 9:00 stand-up in Berlin is 10:00 for us, and there's time to settle a question the same afternoon.

With the US East Coast, your morning meets the end of our day. A call at 9:00 or 10:00 in New York lands at 16:00 or 17:00 here. Everything else runs well in writing: questions you leave in your afternoon can be answered before you're back the next morning.

With the West Coast, the overlap is thin. 8:00 in San Francisco is 18:00 in Moldova. It works best with one standing call at the start of your day and the rest in writing.

A few public holidays differ from yours: Orthodox Christmas (7 January), Orthodox Easter Monday, Memorial Day (the Monday a week after it), Independence Day (27 August) and National Language Day (31 August).

Orthodox Easter often falls on a different date from Western Easter. In 2026 it was 12 April, a week after Western Easter. It's worth a glance when you set a launch date.

Fixed prices, invoiced in EUR

Most of our work is priced as a fixed amount, agreed before it starts. The simplest version is a package: a defined scope, a fixed price and a fixed number of working days. These are the packages on our services page today.

Package	Price	Delivered in
Laravel code audit	€900	Report in 3 working days
Move to database-per-tenant (the plan)	€2,500	5 working days
Laravel and Filament upgrade	from €2,400	5–10 working days
Forms and approvals	€3,500	7 working days
Filament AI assistant	€3,900	5 working days
Filament admin panel	€5,900	10 working days
SaaS MVP	€6,900	10 working days

How payment and the other terms work:

• Payment: 50% when you book and 50% at handoff.
• Audit and migration plan: paid in full when you book, and credited later. The €900 audit comes off a fixed-price project booked within 30 days of the report. The €2,500 plan comes off the migration itself if we do it.
• Upgrades: we confirm the quote after reading your code, before you pay anything. You then pay 50% when you accept the quote and 50% after the production deploy.
• Currency: prices exclude VAT and are invoiced in EUR by XLITE TOWER SRL. Each package page also shows an approximate USD figure, but the invoice is in euros.
• Days: every day in a timeline is a working day, Monday to Friday. Day one starts once we have what we asked for, such as the brief and access to your accounts. Days spent waiting on answers move the delivery date by the same number of days.
• Changes: changes to the agreed scope are welcome. We quote them separately, at a fixed price.

A note on VAT, since Moldova is outside the EU. If you're a VAT-registered business in the EU, a service bought from a supplier outside the EU usually falls under the reverse charge: you account for the VAT yourself, at your country's rate, and can usually deduct it in the same VAT return. Your accountant will confirm how it applies to you.

Anything larger than a package gets a fixed-scope estimate after a first call. If you're not sure what to put in your first message to us, our guide on how to brief a dev agency covers it in a page.

After launch, you can take the code in-house or keep us on a care plan for fixes, updates and small features: €400 a month for up to 4 hours, or €800 a month for up to 8. Anything bigger gets its own fixed-price quote.

What the contract covers

You sign with XLITE TOWER SRL, a company registered in Moldova. Four points cover most of what you'll want to check.

You own the code from the first commit. The repository lives in your GitHub account and the app runs on your hosting, so there is nothing to hand over at the end. The one thing that works differently is our own Packstub plugins, which some packages build on: those are licensed, not sold. The SaaS MVP, for example, includes a licence in your name with a year of plugin updates, and the installed versions keep working after that.

An NDA before we see your code. We're happy to sign one before we get access to your repository.

A data processing agreement when we handle personal data. If we'll work with personal data of people in the EU, the GDPR asks for a written contract between you and us as your processor (Article 28). Moldova isn't on the EU's list of countries with adequate data protection, so sending that data to us needs one more document. The usual one is the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, attached to that agreement. We're happy to sign both.

What's in and what's out, written down. Every package page lists what's included and what isn't, and the details, like the one core feature of a SaaS MVP, are agreed in writing before day one.

You talk to the engineers who write the code

There is no account manager between you and the work. The people on the first call are the people who build, and the whole team works in English. You can see who they are on our about page: Ion Caliman (founder and lead engineer, 12 years), Vitalie Grosu (senior PHP and Laravel engineer, 15+ years) and Laura Caliman (full-stack engineer, 4 years).

Most packages start on any Monday, after a 30-minute call. On longer projects you get a demo every week; on a two-week package like the SaaS MVP, a short update with a link you can click through every couple of days.

When a different setup suits you better

• You need a large team, fast. We're three people. If your plan needs ten engineers next month, a larger agency or your own hiring will get you there sooner.
• Your whole team is on the US West Coast and wants to pair live every day. A team in a nearby time zone gives you more shared hours than we can.
• Your product isn't built on Laravel. Our everyday stack is Laravel and Filament, with Vue or React on the front end. For a product built on something else, a team that lives in that stack will move faster.

Tell us about your project

If the hours, prices and terms above fit, send us a paragraph about your project. You'll get our questions back within 48 hours.