A developer and tester for German businesses, from India
Germany asks harder questions about data than any other market on this site, and asks them earlier. That suits a build where privacy decisions are made before the schema is written rather than retrofitted after launch - which is how I would do it regardless.
Hours, money, and the law
The three things that decide whether hiring across a border works.
Your morning and early afternoon
India is 3.5 hours ahead of Germany in summer and 4.5 in winter. My 2pm is your 10:30am; my 7pm is your 3:30pm. That gives a genuine shared working afternoon every weekday - enough for a standup, a review and an unplanned call - without either of us working unsociable hours. Germany and the UK are the two easiest markets here on the clock.
EUR invoices, and reverse-charge VAT
Invoices are issued in EUR, paid by SEPA transfer or Wise. Services supplied to a German business by a supplier outside the EU fall under the reverse charge: no VAT is added and you account for it on your own return, quoting your USt-IdNr, which appears on the invoice alongside mine. There is no Indian GST on an export of services. German finance departments tend to want the invoice to state the reverse charge explicitly, and it does.
GDPR, and German expectations on top of it
GDPR applies in full, and German practice is stricter than the baseline in ways that matter to a build: consent has to be genuinely opt-in with no pre-ticked boxes, the Impressum and Datenschutzerklärung are legal requirements rather than conventions, and cookie handling has repeatedly been the subject of enforcement. Practically, that means a design that avoids third-party tracking where first-party analytics will do, retention enforced by the database rather than documented in a policy, and a working route for access and erasure requests. Where personal data leaves the EU, the transfer basis is written down.
What clients here usually need
Mittelstand operations systems
Owner-run manufacturers and suppliers replacing spreadsheets and ageing internal tools. This is the ERP and dashboard category in the portfolio, built for a business that intends to run it for a decade.
Privacy-first analytics and consent
Understanding your traffic without importing a compliance problem. First-party measurement where it is sufficient, and honest consent handling where a third-party tool is genuinely required.
Accessibility to a stated standard
German buyers, particularly public-sector-adjacent ones, ask about accessibility concretely. Keyboard paths, focus order, contrast and screen-reader output are tested with axe rather than assumed.
Questions from German clients
The ones that come up before a first call.
By settling it before the schema exists. What is collected, on what lawful basis, how long it is kept and how someone gets it deleted are decided at the start, and the retention is enforced by the database so it cannot quietly stop happening. Analytics is first-party where that is sufficient, which removes most of the consent problem rather than managing it. Where a third-party processor is genuinely needed, it is named in the Datenschutzerklärung and the transfer basis is documented.
No. As a supplier outside the EU, the reverse charge applies for a German business: the invoice carries no VAT, states the reverse charge explicitly, and shows your USt-IdNr, with you accounting for it on your own return. There is no Indian GST on an export of services. This is a general description rather than tax advice - your Steuerberater should confirm it.
No. The working language is English, which is normally fine for engineering conversations with German teams but is worth knowing before you start. Where the site itself needs German - and for a German audience it almost always does - the application is built to hold it properly, and I would rather you supply the copy or a professional translator does than machine-translate your own words and call it finished.
Yes, and for most German clients it should. Both the application and the database can be deployed to an EU region, typically Frankfurt, which keeps personal data inside the EU and removes an awkward paragraph from your privacy documentation. It is decided at the start, because relocating a production database later is disruptive in a way that choosing correctly on day one is not.