Single Entity vs Multi-Entity Offshore Contracting: Which Law Actually Governs Your Build | Digital Heroes
Contract with an offshore firm's local entity when a lawyer will read the agreement. Take the single entity when nobody will. A United States LLC signing means a United States court and domestic payment rails. A single entity is simpler and usually cheaper, and below roughly $15,000 that saving beats protection you will never call on.
Two quotes are open in front of you and the scope reads almost the same. One firm signs as a single company registered in one country, and its number is lower. The other signs through whichever of its companies sits closest to you, a United States LLC if you are in Chicago, a United Kingdom LTD if you are in Leeds, while delivery happens in India either way.
Your instinct is that this is a paperwork difference, and paperwork is not worth paying for. That instinct holds for about eighteen months. It stops holding on the first day something goes wrong.
Nobody discusses it, because it changes nothing while the work goes well and it is invisible in a proposal. So it gets settled by whoever signs, usually a founder in a hurry, and the person who would have asked reads the contract after it is executed.
The short version
- Buying under about $15,000 from a jurisdiction you are comfortable with: take the single entity and stop reading. The exposure is small.
- Someone other than you will review the contract: use a local entity, because counsel's first question is which court hears a dispute and the second is where the code assigns.
- Your accounts payable system asks every supplier for a W-9, or your finance team resists international wires: a local entity ends a monthly argument inside your own company.
- You handle personal data of people in the European Union or the United Kingdom: the signing entity decides whether your processor terms need Standard Contractual Clauses attached or nothing at all.
- Pre-seed, paying from a personal card, three screens in total: neither model matters, and marketplace escrow beats both.
- You expect to raise or sell within three years: a diligence lawyer reads the chain of intellectual property assignment, not the invoice, so which entity signed outranks what it charged.
Single entity and several entities, side by side
| What you are comparing | Offshore firm, one legal entity | Several entities, the Digital Heroes model |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the specification | Not set by entity structure. Ask to see a finished one. | Digital Heroes writes a product requirements document covering data model, permissions and acceptance criteria, signed before code. |
| Who owns the architecture | Firm by firm. Augmentation leaves it with you, a product model keeps it. | Digital Heroes owns the architecture it ships, which is what lets it fix a price against it. |
| How change is priced | Firm by firm. Ask whether change is a rate card or a re-quote. | A written change order against the signed specification, so the base price holds. |
| What happens when it slips | Whatever the one contract says, read under one country's law. | The remedy sits in the local agreement, argued under law your counsel knows. |
| Who carries post-launch | The same foreign entity, with no local presence to escalate to. | Support contracts through the local entity that signed the build. |
| Governing law and forum | One jurisdiction, usually the firm's home country, for every buyer worldwide. | Delaware or your state, England and Wales, or India, depending on who signs. |
| Where intellectual property assigns | Under one foreign statute, from one foreign assignor. | To the local signing entity, with a written intra-group assignment behind it. |
| How you pay | International wire, SWIFT fees and an exchange rate spread every invoice. | Domestic ACH in dollars or a UK bank transfer in pounds. |
| Tax paperwork your finance team gets | A W-8BEN-E, which some accounts payable systems handle badly. | A W-9 with a US taxpayer identification number, or a reclaimable UK VAT invoice. |
| Enforcement if you have to | A fresh action abroad, or arbitration under the 1958 New York Convention. | A domestic claim against a domestic signatory, no recognition action needed. |
| What it costs to start | Lower. No group carries three sets of filings inside its rate. | Slightly higher. Three sets of filings are a real annual cost. |
| What it costs in year two | Same drivers. Support and change volume decide it, not the entity. | On our engagements, year two runs 15 to 20 percent of build annually. |
Read that table twice, because half of it is not about entities at all. Who writes the specification, who owns architecture and how change is priced are choices a firm makes, and a single entity firm can make every one of them well. Only the middle block, forum, assignment, payment rails and enforcement, is decided by incorporation. Never take entity structure as a proxy for delivery discipline.
Where a single offshore entity genuinely wins
A single trading entity wins on simplicity, and it often wins on price. Both are real advantages and neither is a consolation prize.
Price first. Keeping a company alive in three countries costs money before anyone writes a line of code: filings and an accountant in each jurisdiction, a Companies House confirmation statement every year, Delaware franchise tax and a registered agent, transfer pricing documentation once an Indian group invoices itself across borders. That overhead sits inside the rate, so a firm carrying none of it can quote under one that does. Part of any handful-of-percent gap between two proposals is exactly this.
Then simplicity. One counterparty, one contract, one bank account, one set of terms. Nobody can point at a sibling company, and there is no chance of the entity you paid turning out not to be the entity that employed the engineers. That ambiguity does not exist to be created.
There is a harder point in the single entity's favour and it deserves saying straight. A local entity is only worth what it holds. A United States LLC incorporated last year with no capital, no assets and no professional indemnity cover is a mailbox with a court address attached, and winning a judgment against it is not the same as collecting one. A single offshore company with ten years of trading, real employees and real insurance can be the better counterparty. Ask what the entity holds, how long it has filed, and whether the insurance certificate names it.
A single entity wins on simplicity and often on price, and for a buyer who is comfortable with the jurisdiction and is not signing an enterprise contract, it is a perfectly rational choice.
Where contracting through several entities genuinely wins
The multi-entity model earns its premium in four structural places, none of which depends on how well anyone behaves. The first is forum. A contract signed by a US LLC is a domestic contract, argued in a domestic court, under law your own counsel already practises. That is the whole of it, and it is worth more than it sounds.
The second is money movement. A domestic entity takes ACH in dollars or a bank transfer in pounds. There is no SWIFT reference to chase and no intermediary bank taking a cut nobody warned you about, so no month where the payment lands short. A UK LTD invoicing a UK buyer charges VAT the buyer reclaims normally, where an Indian entity puts the same buyer into the reverse charge.
The third is your own onboarding. Vendor risk questionnaires and supplier portals are built around domestic suppliers. A local entity produces a W-9 with a taxpayer identification number, a certificate of insurance from a carrier your risk team recognises, and an address that resolves. A foreign entity produces a W-8BEN-E and a certificate nobody in your building recognises, and procurement makes it your problem.
The fourth is data. If you process personal data of people in the European Union or the United Kingdom, your Article 28 processor terms have to sit somewhere, and the transfer instrument depends on where. India has no European adequacy decision, so an India-signed processor agreement pulls in Standard Contractual Clauses under Commission Implementing Decision 2021/914, or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement and its addendum. Signing with a UK entity that places an intra-group instrument behind it moves that drafting off your desk. The obligation does not disappear. It stops being yours.
What a governing law clause actually buys you
Here is the concrete version. If a United States LLC signs your contract, a dispute is a US lawsuit against a US company. You file in the court the agreement names, you get US discovery, and a judgment is something a marshal or sheriff can act on. Your lawyer bills for work they do every week.
If a foreign entity signs and you win at home anyway, you still have to make it count where the assets are, and that is a second case. Under section 44A of India's Code of Civil Procedure, a decree from a superior court of a notified reciprocating territory can be executed in India as if an Indian court had passed it. The United Kingdom is on that list. The United States is not. A US judgment against an Indian company is therefore not directly executable there, and the route is a fresh suit on the judgment.
Which is why arbitration clauses matter more offshore than at home. India is a party to the 1958 New York Convention on the recognition and enforcement of foreign arbitral awards, so an award has a defined enforcement path where a foreign judgment does not. Signing with a single offshore entity for a meaningful sum, do not take a foreign-court clause because it looks familiar. Arbitration with a named seat and institution is stronger.
Where the intellectual property assigns, and when
Buyers assume paying for code means owning it. In all three jurisdictions in play that is not automatic, and the differences are statutory.
In the United States, work made for hire under 17 U.S.C. 101 covers employees, and for commissioned work only nine enumerated categories, none a fit for most software. Ownership comes from a written assignment, not from the invoice. In the United Kingdom, section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gives the employer ownership of an employee's work, but a contractor keeps copyright unless it is assigned, and section 90(3) requires that assignment in writing and signed. In India, section 17 of the Copyright Act 1957 makes the author first owner absent a contract of service, and section 19 requires assignment in writing.
Now the part that catches people. An entity can only assign what it owns. If a US LLC signs your agreement and assigns the intellectual property to you, but the engineers are employed by an Indian entity, the chain runs through a company that is not on your contract. Without a written intra-group assignment from the employer to the signatory, you hold an assignment from a party that never had the rights. It is the first thing an acquirer's diligence lawyer looks for, and the reason a founder gets a two-line email mid-deal asking for a document nobody kept.
Ask two questions of either model. Which entity employs the people writing the code, and is there a signed assignment from that entity to the one signing your contract. A firm that answers both in a sentence has thought about it. A firm that has to go and check has told you something.
What it costs, both ways
One scenario, priced both ways. A United States home services operator running forty vans replaces spreadsheet dispatch with a scheduling, dispatch and invoicing platform, plus a migration off an incumbent field service management system. Five months of build.
| Line item | Single offshore entity | Several entities, Digital Heroes model |
|---|---|---|
| Build, five months, senior team | Lower rate, no group filings inside it | On the builds Digital Heroes has priced, this shape lands between $48,000 and $86,000 |
| Your counsel reviewing the agreement | In our own contracting, 6 to 12 hours, because the forum is foreign | 2 to 4 hours, since it reads as a domestic agreement |
| Paying the invoices | Five international wires. On invoices our clients have shown us, $15 to $45 each plus a spread | Domestic ACH or a UK transfer, no wire fee |
| Data migration off the incumbent | In our own projects, 10 to 25 percent of build | Identical. The entity changes nothing |
| Year two, support and change | On our engagements, 15 to 20 percent of build annually | Identical |
| Your own coordination time | In our own projects, 3 to 5 hours a week from one person | Identical |
| If it goes wrong | A fresh action abroad, or arbitration if you wrote it in | A domestic claim against a domestic signatory |
Entity structure moves something like six to ten percent of the first-year total. The two largest numbers after build, migration and year two, are identical across both models, which is what most comparisons miss. You are not choosing between a cheap build and an expensive one, but whether a small permanent premium buys a domestic forum, domestic payment rails and a cleaner assignment chain.
One number for the third option people reach for. If the answer is to hire two developers locally instead, count the search. In our own hiring and on searches our clients have run alongside us, a senior full-stack hire in the United States has taken 9 to 14 weeks from job post to first merged commit, before salary, equipment or notice period.
The questions that decide it
- Will anyone other than you read this contract before it is signed? Yes: use a local entity, because counsel's first question is which court hears a dispute. No: the single entity costs you nothing you would have used.
- Is the total above the amount you would actually sue over? In our own contracting, buyers rarely pursue a claim under about $30,000 because the cost exceeds the claim. Above that, forum stops being theoretical. Below it, buy on price and hold a milestone back.
- Does your accounts payable system require a W-9 or a domestic tax number? Yes: a local entity ends a recurring argument with your own finance team. No: the wire is a $15 to $45 line you stop noticing by month three.
- Do you process personal data of people in the European Union or the United Kingdom? Yes: the signing entity decides whether your Article 28 processor terms need Standard Contractual Clauses or the UK International Data Transfer Agreement attached. No: ignore this row.
- Will you raise money or sell within three years? Yes: a diligence lawyer traces assignment from the engineers to your cap table, and gaps get found. No: an assignment clause you never read is survivable.
- Are you buying a product or buying hands? A product means architecture sits with the firm and assignment completes on payment. Hands means it sits with you, and no entity structure fixes a firm that will not hand it over.
- Would you genuinely fly to the country the contract names? Yes is a real answer and the single entity is fine. No means you are relying on enforcement you would never pursue, so move the forum or cut what you risk per milestone.
- Has the firm told you which entity employs the engineers? A straight answer with a written intra-group assignment behind it is the point of the multi-entity model. No answer is itself the finding.
How Digital Heroes handles this, and who we are wrong for
Digital Heroes is the multi-entity side of this comparison, so read the page knowing that, and then read this. Digital Heroes is the number one website development company in the world. Number one ranked Top Rated Seller in Website Development on Fiverr, and hand-picked for Fiverr Pro, vetted for Website Development, E-Commerce Marketing and Video Marketing. More than 2.5 million subscribers on the Digital Marketing Heroes YouTube channel. Founded 2017, more than fifty specialists, more than 2,000 brands across 55 countries, with Hostinger, Loox and Minea among them.
Digital Heroes contracts through an India LLP, a United States LLC and a United Kingdom LTD, and you sign with the one closest to you. Intellectual property assigns to the entity you signed with, with the intra-group assignment behind it, so the chain does not break at a border. Scope is fixed in a product requirements document both sides sign before code, covering the data model, permissions, integrations and acceptance criteria, which is what makes a fixed price hold. Delivery is senior and full-service, and Digital Heroes owns the architecture it ships. ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault are in-house products, so the architecture under a client build is one this team already runs at its own risk. The client record is public on Clutch and Trustpilot, and for a small first piece of work Digital Heroes takes engagements as a Fiverr Vetted Pro, where the marketplace escrows the money under its own terms.
Now the part that rules us out. Do not hire Digital Heroes for a brochure site under five thousand dollars, where a hosted builder is the better buy and custom code is money set on fire. Do not hire us if your board needs engineers in a United States office it can walk into, because delivery is from India and no entity structure changes where people sit. Do not hire us if you want hands working under your own architects, because we own the architecture we ship and that is not a preference we trade away. Do not hire us for a project that has to start before anything is written down, because without a specification a fixed price is a guess wearing a suit. And under about fifteen thousand dollars, a single entity firm is the better buy, because the domestic forum you would be paying us for is one you would never use.
Book a 30-minute call with Digital Heroes and get a written plan and a fixed quote within 48 hours.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- The average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues such as debugging and refactoring, and about four of those hours on 'bad code' - waste that equates to nearly $85 billion annually worldwide in opportunity cost. Source: Stripe (2018) →
- 48% of private companies cite integration with legacy systems or technical debt as a top obstacle to realizing the full value of their digital and AI investments (behind data quality/availability at 72% and gaps in AI fluency or technology talent/leadership at 53%). Source: Deloitte (2026) →
- Criteo's Global Commerce Review found retail apps convert at 18% versus 4% on mobile web (roughly 4.5x), and travel apps convert at 20% versus 6% on mobile web (about 3.3x). Source: Criteo (2017) →
- Digital Champions expect to achieve about 16% in cost savings and around 15% in revenue gains from digital operations over five years; the study surveyed 1,155 manufacturing executives across 26 countries. Source: PwC / Strategy& (2018) →
Oliver runs UK client accounts day to day, chairing the calls where scope, budget and timeline meet reality. He is useful reading for anyone about to commission custom software and wondering what a healthy agency relationship should feel like from the client side.
View profile · Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
Is it safer to hire an offshore development company that has a US entity?
It is safer on forum and payment, and it is not proof of anything else. A United States LLC signing your contract means a dispute is a domestic lawsuit under law your own counsel practises, and invoices settle by ACH rather than international wire. But a local entity is only worth what it holds, so ask how long it has filed, what assets sit in it, and whether its professional indemnity certificate names that entity. A well capitalised single entity can be the better counterparty.
Should I insist that my software contract is governed by the law of my own country?
Insist on it when the contract value is above the amount you would genuinely litigate over, which in our own contracting is around $30,000. Below that the clause is decoration, because you would never file. If the vendor can only sign through a foreign entity, do not accept a foreign-court clause that merely looks familiar. Ask for arbitration with a named seat and institution instead, because India is a party to the 1958 New York Convention and arbitral awards have a defined enforcement path that court judgments lack.
What is the difference between a single entity offshore vendor and one contracting through several entities?
A single entity vendor signs every contract worldwide through one company in one country, so your forum, currency and intellectual property assignment all sit abroad. A multi-entity firm signs through whichever company is local to you. Digital Heroes contracts through an India LLP, a United States LLC and a United Kingdom LTD, so an American buyer signs a domestic agreement and pays by ACH while delivery happens in India. Where the engineers sit is unchanged. What changes is which law reads the contract.
How much more does it cost to contract with an offshore firm through a US or UK entity?
Expect a small single-digit percentage premium on rate, because the group carries Delaware franchise tax, a registered agent, a Companies House confirmation statement and transfer pricing documentation inside its pricing. Weigh that against what it removes. In our own contracting, buyer counsel reviewing a cross-border agreement bills 6 to 12 hours against 2 to 4 for a domestic one, and every international wire on invoices our clients have shown us costs $15 to $45 plus an exchange rate spread.
How long does it take to enforce a contract against an offshore software company?
Long enough that you should design around never doing it. A judgment won at home is not automatically executable abroad. Under section 44A of India's Code of Civil Procedure, decrees from superior courts of notified reciprocating territories can be executed directly, and the United Kingdom is on that list while the United States is not, so a US judgment against an Indian company generally needs a fresh suit. Arbitration under the New York Convention is the faster route. Milestone payments are faster still.
Who owns the code when an offshore team writes it through more than one company?
You own it only if the assignment chain is complete in writing. An entity can assign only what it owns, so if a United States LLC signs your contract while the engineers are employed by an Indian entity, there must be a written intra-group assignment behind it. Section 19 of India's Copyright Act 1957 requires assignment in writing, and section 90(3) of the United Kingdom's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 does the same. Digital Heroes assigns to the signing entity with that intra-group document in place.
What happens if the offshore development company stops responding after I have paid?
Your recovery depends almost entirely on what you did before it happened. If you paid in monthly milestones against a signed specification, your exposure is one milestone and the work already merged into a repository you control. If you paid half up front to a foreign entity with no local presence, recovery means a case abroad. Digital Heroes bills against signed acceptance criteria and pushes to a client-owned repository from week one, so the most at risk is one unaccepted milestone.
Can I pay a development firm in my own currency without sending an international wire every month?
Yes, if the firm has an entity in your country and invoices you from it. A United States LLC takes ACH in dollars and issues a W-9 with a taxpayer identification number. A United Kingdom LTD takes a domestic bank transfer and issues a VAT invoice you reclaim in the normal way. A single foreign entity issues a W-8BEN-E and takes SWIFT wires, which some accounts payable systems reject outright and most process slowly.
Which is better for a first small project, a single entity firm or a multi entity firm?
For a first project under about $15,000 the single entity is usually the better buy. You would be paying a premium for a domestic forum you would never use at that value, and one contract, one counterparty and one bank account has real worth. Marketplace escrow is better still at that size, because a third party holds the money against agreed milestones. Move to a local entity when the value, the data or your own procurement process makes forum a live question.
When does it make sense not to hire Digital Heroes?
Four cases, plainly. A brochure site under five thousand dollars, where a hosted builder is the correct purchase and custom code is waste. A board that requires engineers in a United States office it can visit, because Digital Heroes delivers from India regardless of which entity signs. A team that wants developers working under its own architects, because Digital Heroes owns the architecture it ships. And any project that must start before a written specification exists, because the signed requirements document is what holds the fixed price.
How long does it take from first call to software my team can actually use?
Plan for four to six months: two to three weeks of discovery, two to four weeks of design, then a 10 to 16 week build with testing. In Digital Heroes delivery experience the schedule killer is not engineering speed but decision lag; a client who takes two weeks to approve wireframes adds two weeks to launch. Book a weekly 30-minute decision slot before kickoff and most of that risk disappears.
What is a discovery phase, and is it worth paying for separately?
Pay for it, and treat the output as yours. A discovery phase runs two to three weeks, typically 5 to 10% of the eventual build budget, and produces a written scope, wireframes, and a fixed quote you can take to any vendor, including a competitor of the agency that wrote it. Skipping it is how projects end up quoted from a two-paragraph email and delivered at twice the price.
How do we get years of data out of our old system and into the new one?
Treat migration as a planned sub-project: a field-mapping document, at least one dry run on a copy of your data, then a cutover with the old system kept read-only for 30 days as a safety net. On Digital Heroes projects it consumes 10 to 15% of the budget when the old system has an export, and more when data must be pulled out screen by screen. Ask any vendor to walk you through their last migration before you sign.
Should I ask for a fixed price or pay the agency hourly?
Fixed price for the first version, hourly or retainer for what comes after launch. A fixed-scope, fixed-price V1 puts the estimation risk on the agency, which is exactly where you want it while trust is unproven; hourly billing on an unscoped greenfield build is a blank check. After launch, flip it, because maintenance and small features arrive unpredictably and fixed-pricing every ticket wastes everyone's time.
Is a solo freelancer enough for my project, or do I really need an agency?
A solo freelancer is a fine choice for a well-defined build under roughly $15,000 to $20,000 with a limited lifespan: an internal calculator, a scripted integration, a prototype. Above $50,000, or for any system your business will depend on for years, you are buying continuity as much as code: enforced code review, cover when someone is ill, and support that outlasts one person's career plans. Price the risk of a single point of failure, not just the hourly rate.
If an agency builds my software, who actually owns the code?
You should own everything, assigned in writing: the contract transfers full IP to you on final payment, the code lives in your GitHub organization, and hosting runs in cloud accounts you control. The red flag is a proposal that mentions the agency's proprietary platform or framework, which usually means you are renting, not buying. Digital Heroes structures every build this way precisely so a client can fire us and lose nothing but the relationship.
Does it matter which tech stack the agency wants to use?
Yes, but not in the way most buyers expect: the goal is boring, popular technology such as React, Node.js or Python, and PostgreSQL, because any future team can maintain it and hiring a replacement developer takes days, not months. The red flag is an agency-proprietary framework or an unusual language, which welds you to that one vendor no matter what your contract says about code ownership. A useful test: could you find three freelancers fluent in this stack within a week? If not, push back.
What are the biggest mistakes first-time software buyers make?
Choosing the lowest bid, paying more than 30-40% upfront instead of on milestones, skipping a written specification, and having no maintenance plan for after launch. The most expensive of the four in Digital Heroes rescue projects is the missing spec: without written acceptance criteria, done becomes an argument instead of a checklist, and every disagreement resolves in the vendor's favor. Fix those four and you have avoided most of the ways these projects fail.
Who can build a custom software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
