Worqly · You paid for the code. You may not own it.

You paid for the code. You may not own it.

Developers in Vietnam, Indonesia and Latin America keep legal ownership of what they build unless very specific documents exist. Most companies don't have them.

Measure your exposure
Ownership

The clause that works at home does nothing there.

US contracts hand over ownership with one standard phrase. That phrase carries no legal weight in Vietnam, Indonesia or Mexico. Until a second document is signed under local law, the developer still owns the work. Almost nobody signs it, and almost nobody finds out until an investor asks for proof.

Fit

Series A. Offshore engineers. Real exposure.

If part of your product was written by people you pay against an invoice in Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia or the Philippines, this applies to you. The more of the codebase they touched, the more it costs to fix later.

Next

You leave with a figure, not a proposal.

The estimate is built from your public job postings before the call begins. You have it in the first two minutes, whether or not anything follows.

Example of what you get
A company hiring six engineers in Vietnam
$63,000
Value of work it may not legally own
Six developers at roughly $30,000 a year each. Under Vietnamese law the code stays with the person who wrote it until a separate transfer is signed. No transfer had been signed.
IP Law 07/2022/QH15, Art. 20 and 86
What this does not tell you: whether your own contracts have that document. That is what the call is for.
Detail

The questions that come up.

Everything below tends to surface eventually. It is here so it does not have to wait for a call.

Is this legal advice?
No, and it is not meant to be. The report is an operational risk assessment: every agreement scored against the statute, every gap cited to the article it comes from. What to do about those gaps is a decision for your counsel. Most find the work useful precisely because the analysis is finished by the time it reaches their desk.
Will you sign an NDA?
Of course. A mutual NDA executes at the intake gate by default, before any upload is technically possible, so nothing arrives unprotected either way. If your team prefers a negotiated agreement instead, one is drafted here for a small fixed fee, quoted the moment you ask. It is rarely the part of this that anyone worries about twice.
What happens to our contracts afterwards?
Encrypted at rest, access-logged, never used to train anything, deleted thirty days after delivery. Salary figures and names can be redacted before upload without weakening the analysis, since the finding lives in the clause, not in the number beside it.
How long does it take, and how much of our time?
Seventy-two hours from the moment readable documents arrive. On your side, under ten minutes: a drag-and-drop form for files you already have. No meeting is required to begin. The walkthrough happens at delivery, not before.
What if you find nothing?
It happens, and it is worth knowing. In that case the fee converts to credit against future work. There is no version of this where you paid for nothing, which is the only honest way to price a diagnostic.
Who actually does the work?
Worqly is operated by a former associate at a Band-1 corporate and international tax practice, who later scaled employer-of-record compliance across more than a hundred countries for a YC-backed company. Every finding cites its article, so none of that has to be taken on faith.
We already use Deel or Remote.
They move money and handle payroll, competently. Neither reads your agreement against Vietnamese or Indonesian law, because that is not what they were built to do. Nothing has to be replaced or migrated. This sits alongside.
Our lawyer already reviewed these.
Then the review will be short. The question worth asking is whether Vietnam's Labour Code Article 13 or Indonesia's Law 28/2014 came up by name. Cross-border IP transfer is a narrow specialty, and excellent generalists have no particular reason to carry it.
Could we not run this through an AI model ourselves?
For a summary, certainly. For a figure that goes into a data room, the difference is a deterministic rule library checked against the statute, plus a second independent pass that has to agree with the first. Ask a model for the exact exposure under IRC Section 3509 on a contractor at $180,000 across three years, and compare what comes back.
Does anyone need access to our repository?
No. Agreements and payment records are enough. Nothing touches the codebase, and no credentials change hands at any point.
What does it cost?
The figure is given on the call, once the scope is actually clear. It is a fixed fee rather than a retainer, and it tends to land below what people expect for what it covers. Quoting it before knowing the shape of your team would be guessing.
Where are the terms and the data policy?
Both are published rather than sent on request: Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. They cover scope, fees, confidentiality, sub-processors and retention. Worth a glance before the call if procurement will be involved, since it usually removes a round of questions later.
We are already in a dispute with a contractor.
Then this is the wrong service, and pretending otherwise would not help you. Active disputes belong with litigation counsel. Worth returning once it is resolved, since the same gap usually still exists underneath.
Worqly

Worqly provides operational risk-mitigation and compliance-workflow automation. Worqly is not a law firm, does not provide legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship.

Exposure Engineering