Core70's engineers work from China every day. Companies come to us for one of two reasons. You are taking a product or a business into China and need people for whom WeChat, Alipay and Chinese cloud are routine. Or you want named engineers in China on your own product, full-time, at a published rate — SGD 55 per hour, 70% of it to the engineer. Either way you talk to the engineers directly, and the same people stay on your work.
"Software development in China" means two unrelated things depending on who is searching. We answer both on this page, because the engineers are the same people.
Mini programs, official accounts, WeChat Pay and Alipay, Alibaba or Tencent Cloud, marketplace integrations, and the filings and data rules that come with them — built by engineers who live inside that ecosystem and know which parts of it have no shortcut.
What launching in China actually involves →Named engineers, full-time on your work, talking to you directly, with live overlap every UK and European working morning and the whole day for Singapore and Australia. A published 70/10/20 split instead of a blended rate, and the same people in year five.
How the engagement works →Most of the difficulty is not code. It is accounts, verifications, filings and platform rules that have no equivalent outside China — and that a vendor abroad discovers one at a time. Here is the list, and what we do about each item.
| What you need | What it takes | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| WeChat mini program & official account | Registration and verification run on Tencent's process. A mini program that takes payment needs a Chinese business entity behind the account. | Design, build, test and submit for review. You hold the account; we never own your presence. |
| WeChat Pay & Alipay | Merchant onboarding; cross-border merchant options exist for companies without a Chinese entity, with different fees and settlement. | Integrate payments, refunds and reconciliation into your system, and tell you which merchant route fits your entity structure. |
| Hosting in China & ICP filing | Serving a website or app from mainland servers requires an ICP filing, which only a Chinese entity can hold. Without it, you host outside the mainland and accept the latency. | Set up Alibaba Cloud or Tencent Cloud, prepare the filing with your Chinese entity, and architect for either case. |
| Marketplaces: Tmall, JD.com, Douyin | Storefronts, order and inventory sync with your ERP, after-sales flows, each platform with its own API and rules. | Build the integration layer once and make each platform conform to it — the approach we used for HP's mainland storefront. |
| Xiaohongshu & Douyin presence | Xiaohongshu offers no general publishing API; what can be automated is limited and changes. | Build what the platforms allow — landing flows, lead capture, analytics — and say plainly what they don't. |
| Data & privacy (PIPL) | China's Personal Information Protection Law governs Chinese users' data, with rules on where it is stored and how it leaves the country. | Architecture that keeps Chinese users' data where the law expects it, with the rest of your system untouched. |
| Localisation | Simplified Chinese, local payment and address formats, customer service hours, and UX conventions that differ from the West. | Native-speaking engineers who have shipped to Chinese users, working with your team in English or Mandarin. |
We start with a short, fixed-price phase (USD 2,000–5,000, quoted in SGD or GBP) that produces three things: the architecture, including where data and hosting will sit; a platform-by-platform checklist of accounts and filings and who must hold each; and a phased plan with a price range for each phase. Build then proceeds in steps that each deliver working software — usually the mini program or storefront first, integrations second. Where you want it, the same engineers run the system in production afterwards as a Dedicated Team.
HP China needed a mainland storefront before the global platform could arrive. We built it on Magento and Alibaba Cloud, integrated JD.com and Digital China, and went live in 2017. Within twelve months online revenue had tripled. It became the template for fifteen more countries.
Shinetech, the group behind Core70, has run engineering centres in China since 2001, with clients in the UK, US, Australia and Singapore — several in their second decade. Core70 is the version of that with the pricing on the table.
About SGD 8,800 per engineer per month full-time; in USD it sits inside our published USD 40–50 range. Of every dollar, 70% goes to the engineer, 10% to the Account Owner responsible for you, 20% to the company. The full 70/10/20 breakdown →
Not a blended rate and not a bench. The engineer is paid from your work, so nobody is reassigned when a bigger account calls. Knowledge of your system stays with the people who have it.
Singapore and Australia share the working day. UK and European teams get live overlap every working morning — conversation time, not a handover window — and the rest runs asynchronously.
You talk to the engineers, not to a manager who talks to them. Daily contact over your own tools; code in your repositories; environments you control. For UK clients with strict data requirements, in-jurisdiction handling through our UK entity is available. How we handle your data →
Two shapes: a Dedicated Developer where you run production, or a Dedicated Team where we do, at developer rate + 10%. Most engagements begin with a free code health check.
If you are buying on the lowest hourly rate, if you want to hand over an outcome without talking to the engineers who deliver it, or if you see developers as interchangeable, we are the wrong supplier — and will say so early. For a China launch, we will also tell you which parts need a Chinese entity before you spend anything on code.
One business day. Named engineers, a plain answer on price, and — for China — a plain answer on what the platforms will and won't let you do.