QA outsourcing services from an independent testing company
QA outsourcing means handing your software testing to a company outside your development team. We are an independent testing company with 50+ engineers. We have tested other people's software since 2018, we are not the team that wrote yours, and we have no development contract to protect by staying quiet about defects.
An embedded team can be working on your product in about two weeks. If you are not happy with those first two weeks, you do not pay for them.
// what you hand over
- Test strategy
- Tooling and licences
- Execution, manual and automated
- Reporting
- Staffing and cover
What you can outsource to us
- A full testing function. We plan it, run it, staff it and report on it. See managed testing services.
- Extra hands on an existing team. Your QA lead, our engineers, your process.
- A specialist for a fixed piece of work. Performance, security, accessibility, or API testing, where hiring full time makes no sense for a few weeks a year.
- Test automation. Building a suite, or rescuing one that everybody has stopped trusting.
Most engagements start as one of these and turn into another. The contract flexes.
Why companies outsource QA
Speed of standing up. Hiring five QA engineers takes months in most markets. An embedded team of ours can be productive in two weeks, which suits a post funding sprint.
Specialists you cannot justify hiring. Performance engineers, security testers and accessibility auditors are expensive and idle most of the year on a single product. Ours are shared across accounts.
Tool fatigue. Playwright, Cypress, JMeter, OWASP ZAP and the rest have to be chosen, licensed and maintained by somebody. We bring our own, and the five we built ourselves are included.
Objectivity. Internal QA answers to the person asking whether it can ship on Friday. We do not sit in that meeting. We report what we found and the pressure to round it down is not on us.
Time zone overlap. Our engineers are in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (GMT+2, GMT+3 in summer). That covers the European working day and overlaps the start of the US East Coast day. Code merged at the end of the US day is usually tested by the next morning.
When outsourcing is the wrong answer
We would rather say this on the page than on the third call.
We used to say this did not work below about five developers. That is no longer true, and it is worth saying why. A small team shipping with coding agents produces several times the code it produced two years ago, and the defects scale with the output rather than with the headcount. No one added review capacity to match. Team size stopped predicting how much testing you need.
What does still hold: outsourcing does not work where the contract requires staff on site or nationals only, which is common in defence and parts of healthcare. And it is a poor fit where testing is genuinely core to how your company differentiates itself, because you should own that.
If you want the long version with the cost arithmetic worked through, we keep it at QA outsourcing vs in-house testing. It argues both sides and it is not a sales pitch.
How we start
Two weeks, no contract. Unhappy and you do not pay. We embed, learn the product, write tests and file real bugs against your actual software. You then decide whether to carry on, and we invoice from week three.
We do this because nobody can judge testing quality from a proposal. Every QA company describes itself the same way. Two weeks of real bug reports against your own product settles it in a way that a reference call cannot.
After that: a named team, the same people month to month, a maintained suite, and reporting you can forward without rewriting.
What it costs
$25 to $45 an hour, depending on seniority, how long you commit for, and the mix of manual, automation and specialist work. Longer commitments move down that range.
Every engineer on your product has shipped commercial releases before. The rate moves with seniority, commitment length and the mix of work, never by swapping in people new to testing. We compete on what the testing is worth, not on being the cheapest quote in your inbox, and we would rather lose to a lower bid than win by staffing your product with people who have not seen your domain before.
Included at no licence cost: BugBoard for test management and AI test generation, Flows for automation that heals its own selectors, Auditi for GDPR, WCAG and FDA auditing, BetterFlow so you can see what the hours went into, and our AI Security Toolkit. We built all five because the off the shelf versions did not keep up with us.
Credentials, and what each one is actually worth
- Four ISO certificates. ISO 9001:2015 (quality management), ISO/IEC 27001:2022 (information security), ISO 14001:2015 (environmental), ISO 13485:2016 (medical devices). ISO 13485 is the medical device quality standard, and we hold it alongside 9001, 14001 and 27001. It is the one medical device manufacturers look for when they qualify a testing supplier, because their own quality system has to account for who tests their software.
- A NATO procurement agreement. We hold the NATO NCIA Basic Ordering Agreement (NCAGE 1JGAL), reference NCIA/BOA/42405442. It is a signed ordering agreement, the thing NATO actually issues to suppliers. Any NATO body, and the government agencies of NATO member nations, can order from us under terms that are already signed, so a project starts without a contract negotiation.
- Avetta Consortium member since February 2025. That is supply chain prequalification, used by large buyers to pre-screen contractors. We are an Avetta member, so supply-chain teams that screen contractors through Avetta can onboard us directly.
- 4.9 on Clutch across 65+ reviews. It is the one item on this list written by clients rather than by an auditor or a procurement office.
- Specialists you would not hire full time. A security tester and a performance engineer can join your account for a fortnight without us recruiting for it.
Our ISO 27001 covers how we handle your data, credentials and test environments, and our ISO 9001 quality system governs how every engagement runs. We send the certificates with their scope statement, so your procurement team reads it first-hand.
Common questions
Is outsourced QA as good as in-house?
Different rather than worse. You gain specialists and objectivity, and you lose some product intuition in the first month. Keeping the same engineers on your product for six months and longer is how we close most of that gap.
How do you handle our data?
We sign NDAs, we work inside your VPN and tooling where you want us to, and the handling is covered by our ISO 27001 management system. For a regulated product, ask us for the scope statement rather than the certificate.
What if it does not work out?
If you are not happy with the first two weeks, you do not pay for them, and after that you are not locked into a long contract to find out. When engagements end, you keep the test suites, the documentation and the tooling configuration.
Can you work with our existing QA team?
Most of our work is this. Your lead keeps the process and we add capacity or specialists underneath it.
Talk to us
Tell us what you ship, how often, and what is going wrong. We will tell you whether outsourcing helps, and if it does not, we will tell you that instead.
Need help with software testing?
BetterQA provides independent QA services across manual testing, automation, security audits, and performance testing. ISO 27001, 9001, 14001 and 13485 certified.