Christin Sharpe

Start with relevant experience, not the size of the portfolio. Request a couple of projects that resemble your domain and your stack, and then ask whether those engineers are still with the company. An honest provider will put you on a call with the people who would work on your project. Answers that name nobody at this stage almost always mean the demo work came from somewhere else.

The agreement needs more attention than the sales deck. Three clauses do most of the work: ownership of the code, the NDA, and notice periods and handover. Every artifact must transfer to you on payment, including source code, designs and infrastructure as code. Watch for wording that leaves so-called reusable libraries with the vendor, because this is frequently the part you cannot replace later.

Ask where their numbers come from. A credible estimate is accompanied by a written set of assumptions, retail ecommerce software development company a task-level breakdown and next.js development services a best case and symfony web development company a worst case. A fixed price only makes sense when the requirements are stable and documented; when the scope is still moving the vendor prices the risk in and you pay for uncertainty either way. Hourly billing shifts that risk to you, so it requires visible weekly reporting and a spending cap.

How the work is run matters as much as headcount. Find out what happens when the scope changes, who writes the acceptance criteria and what the QA setup looks like. A mature team should be able to demonstrate a live build at the end of each sprint. Acceptance criteria in writing are the only reliable protection against endless rounds of rework.

Finally, think about the day you no longer need this vendor while the relationship is still good. Insist that the source repository sits on infrastructure you own from the first commit, and that documentation is written as you go rather than left to the end. A partner who is comfortable with this says yes immediately; hesitation here says most of what you need to know.