Valentina Akpan — Founder, Rellatech
· 8 min read
I get asked this almost every week. Someone has been quoted $8 an hour by an agency in the Philippines and $55 an hour by me, and they want to know if I am about to talk them out of the obvious choice.
I am not. There are days I would tell you to hire offshore in a heartbeat. But the price on the contract is rarely the price you end up paying, and I would rather walk you through the whole picture than pretend the rate card tells the story.
What you actually pay per hour
Rough brackets I see in 2026, ignoring outliers in either direction:
| Type | Typical rate | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Offshore generalist | $5 to $15 / hour | Data entry, repetitive admin, high-volume low-stakes work |
| Onshore generalist | $25 to $50 / hour | Client-facing work, judgement calls, North American context |
| Onshore specialist or technical virtual assistant | $40 to $80 / hour | CRM builds, automations, websites, systems, dashboards |
On a spreadsheet, offshore wins every line. The interesting question is what one of those hours actually buys you once you add in your own time, the rework, and the slow stuff that does not have a line item.
The costs that never make it onto an invoice
I have rebuilt enough offshore handovers to have a pattern in my head of where the savings leak away. None of these are dealbreakers on their own. Stacked together, they are why most of the founders who call me started offshore and did not stay.
The day you lose to a time zone
When there is a 12 hour gap between you and your assistant, a quick clarification turns into 48 hours of ping-pong. That is fine for a research task. It is painful when your client is waiting on the other side of the email.
Briefs that have to do all the work
Tone of voice, idioms, the unspoken bits of North American business culture, they do not transfer cleanly. You end up writing longer briefs, doing another round of edits, and rewriting the client email that almost worked. That time is real, it just does not show up anywhere.
Initiative, or the lack of it
At $8 an hour, agencies have built their model around following instructions, not improving them. The savings vanish the moment you are directing for two hours a day instead of reviewing for one hour a week.
Quiet turnover
A lot of offshore assistants juggle three or four clients at once, and tenure on any one client is short. Every replacement is a fresh onboarding, a fresh round of small mistakes, and another month before the rhythm comes back.
Data you probably should not send
If your work touches PIPEDA, HIPAA, GDPR, or financial records, sending it offshore opens real legal questions. They are not unsolvable. They are also not questions most founders want to be the test case for.
The cheapest hour is the one I do not have to manage.
When offshore is genuinely the right call
This is not a hit piece. I have briefed offshore contractors myself, and they have been brilliant for the right kind of work. Offshore tends to win when the task is high volume, fully scripted, and not in front of your client. Things like scraping lead lists, tagging images, doing the first pass on transcripts, or working through a pile of data entry to a clear SOP.
It also works when you already have the management bandwidth to brief and review properly, and when unit economics on a process matter more to you than turnaround.
When onshore actually pays for itself
The case for an onshore virtual assistant (Canadian, US, UK, Australian) is rarely the hourly rate. It is everything around the hourly rate.
If a virtual assistant is going to write to your clients in your name, triage your inbox, route leads, draft proposals, or make the small judgement calls that keep things moving on a Tuesday afternoon, you want someone in the same business culture and the same business hours as you. Same for systems work. CRM builds, automations, websites, dashboards, and course platforms are where I spend most of my own week, and they need someone who can sit on a call with you, scope it in plain English, and ship.
A $50 an hour onshore virtual assistant who works 10 hours and gets it right is cheaper than a $10 an hour offshore one who works 60 hours, when you also count the 10 hours you spend fixing the output.
The hybrid most growing businesses land on
The setups I see working long term are almost never either/or. They are usually one onshore lead virtual assistant who owns the systems and the client-facing work, with one or two offshore contractors plugged in underneath for the high-volume execution under that lead's SOPs.
You get onshore judgement at the top, offshore unit economics at the bottom, and the management burden lives with the lead, not with you. That last bit is usually what the founders who tried offshore alone were missing.
A simple way to decide
When I sit with a founder who is genuinely torn, I usually walk them through two questions:
- If this task gets done wrong, who pays the cost? If the honest answer is "my client", go onshore.
- If this person quits tomorrow, how long before things are back to normal? If it is more than two weeks, go onshore.
Everything else is fair game for offshore, as long as someone onshore owns the brief.
Want a lead who owns the system?
I am a Canadian technical virtual assistant working with founders and growing businesses across North America, the UK, and Australia. I run the systems, the automations, and the client-facing work, and I am happy to brief offshore contractors under my SOPs when that is the right call for you.
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