What React work costs in India
Senior React developers: ₹1,700 to ₹2,900/hour freelance (the India band), ₹80,000 to ₹3,00,000/month dedicated. Project-based: SPAs and dashboards ₹4,75,000 to ₹25,00,000+ per the web app cost guide. Rates below ₹1,000/hour for "senior React" are a contradiction in terms.
The code test that filters seniors from tutorial-level
- Show a component they wrote. Ask: why is state shaped this way? Where does data fetching happen and why there?
- Ask what they do when a parent component re-renders too often. Seniors mention memoization, dependency arrays, splitting state, or moving state down, with a war story.
- Ask about a production bug they caused and fixed. Juniors blame tools; seniors describe the debugging process.
- Ask how they would test it. "We test manually" is acceptable for small sites; senior app developers name at least the approach.
Where React hiring goes wrong in India
- Hiring a "React developer" for a content site. React is for application behavior; a content site needs a CMS and craft, see frontend development.
- Full-time hires before project work proves the fit. Contract first, convert later.
- No design system or component library expectations: every screen becomes bespoke, costs compound.
Where the good ones are
Referrals from CTOs and product people, GitHub profiles with real commit history, and developers who publish their reasoning (blogs, answers, teardown posts). This desk builds React applications with published React bands and senior-only execution, see the dedicated model for ongoing work.