Difference between 10x $50k/year developers and 10x $150k/year developers is $1m/year. How much money would a company need to actually do an effort? Billion? Are lawyers who can fill some papers that expensive?
Bearing in mind if we’re going for 3x cheaper we’re not getting people that are super competitive on the global market:
Your other costs are not just lawyers: you’ll often need near perfect task definitions and acceptance criteria. That takes time (=money) and it requires a degree of upfront knowledge of the system that is way higher than if you’re working with devs you’re interacting with 6 times a day.
You’ll often realize that you messed up the specs on some edge case or they messed the implementation, and you get a redo a full cycle for the correction. And all that could be opportunity cost as well for your PO dealing with that team.
That remote team also probably won’t have the same access to your production than your local team for many reasons, including legal ones.
You’ll also have to adjust for timezones, regular trips etc. You then factor in the stress on wether your staff wants to babysit a remote team.
All in all, it’s not as clear cut as just stacking salaries, except if you’re IBM or Accenture, where the result doesn’t really matter much and the above quagmire is your core competency.
PS: hiring a $150k/year remote team is another story, of course.
