Offshore, Nearshore, Onshore: The Decision Minus the Sales Pitch
Anneke de Vries · May 28, 2026
Offshore, nearshore, onshore. Three words that get treated as a strategic framework and are in fact a marketing taxonomy, invented mostly by people who wanted a category to sell you. Think about what they actually mean. Nearshore means "geographically near you." Offshore means "far away." Onshore means "here." None of those describe anything you care about operationally. You do not care about kilometres. You care about whether you can get an answer before end of day, what the work costs, and whether your lawyer is going to have opinions. So let us throw the words out and rebuild the decision from the variables that actually determine whether this works.