Thinking about opening an India office for your startup/scale-up? Here's the real cost comparison

Been researching GCC (Global Capability Center) setups in India for a project, and the cost differences between cities are bigger than I expected — worth sharing for anyone here scaling a remote team.

Quick numbers:

• Bangalore: ~$38K/year for a mid-level engineer, $1.80/sq ft office rent. Best talent pool, but priciest and highest turnover (~22%).
• Hyderabad: $25K-$38K range, rent as low as $0.90/sq ft, fast government approvals (15-day turnaround). Good fintech/life sciences ecosystem.
• Pune: Cheapest overall — $26K salary, $0.80/sq ft rent — and the most stable team (~16% attrition). Strong for product engineering.
• Gurgaon: Similar salary range to Hyderabad, more suited to B2B/consulting-style operations, close to Delhi.
  You can realistically save 40-60% vs. hiring the same roles in the US/Europe regardless of which city you choose — the differences between cities are more about talent specialty and retention than raw savings.

For anyone bootstrapping this without a huge legal budget, there's also an Employer-of-Record route that lets you get a small pilot team (10-30 people) running without setting up a full entity — worth looking into before committing to a Wholly Owned Subsidiary.

Full comparison with the numbers: https://theintechgroup.com/blog/best-cities-for-gcc-set-up-in-india/

Anyone here already running an India-based team? Curious which city you landed on and why.