Christin Sharpe

Look first at domain experience, not the size of the portfolio. Ask for a couple of projects that resemble your domain and your stack, and then find out who actually wrote that code. A serious vendor will introduce you to the people who would work on your project. Evasive answers at this stage almost always mean the demo work came from somewhere else.

The contract warrants a slower read than the pitch. Three sections matter more than the rest: assignment of intellectual property, confidentiality, and exit terms and handover. Everything produced has to transfer to you as it is paid for, along with source code, designs and infrastructure as code. Be careful with any clause that leaves so-called reusable libraries with the vendor, because it is usually the part you cannot replace later.

Ask where their numbers come from. An honest estimate comes with a list of assumptions, a breakdown per feature and a best case and outsource react js development a worst case. A fixed price only makes sense when the scope is genuinely frozen; otherwise the supplier pads the number and you pay for uncertainty either way. A time-and-materials model moves the risk back to the client, so it demands visible weekly reporting and a spending cap.

Process matters more than headcount. Ask what happens when the scope changes, who defines done and what the QA setup looks like. A mature team should be able to show you a live build at the end of each sprint. Written acceptance criteria are your only real protection against the it-was-never-in-scope conversation.

Last, consider the day you no longer need this vendor while the relationship is still good. Ask that the source repository stays under your account from the first commit, and that the documentation which is better vue or react refreshed in every sprint. A provider confident in its own work says yes immediately; hesitation here tells you a great deal.