Christin Sharpe

Start with domain experience, not the number of logos on the website. Request a couple of engagements that resemble your technology stack, and then ask specifically whether those engineers are still with the web development services company. An honest provider will put you on a call with the people who would work on your project. Vague answers at this stage generally mean you are talking to a reseller.

The paperwork deserves a slower read than the pitch. Three sections matter more than the rest: intellectual property assignment, custom react native development non-disclosure, and termination and custom development vs saas handover. All the work product should transfer to you as it is paid for, along with designs, scripts and infrastructure configuration. Be careful with language that leaves so-called reusable libraries with the vendor, as that is often exactly the piece that locks you in.

Find out how the estimate was built. An honest estimate arrives with a list of assumptions, a task-level breakdown and a best case and a worst case. A fixed-price contract is only reasonable when the requirements are stable and documented; when the scope is still moving the provider pads the number and you fund the buffer regardless. A time-and-materials model moves the risk back to the client, so it requires a cap, regular demos and transparent reporting.

How the work is run beats the number of developers. Find out how change requests are handled, who writes the acceptance criteria and what the QA setup looks like. A mature team will be able to show you running software development for fintech rather than status reports. Written acceptance criteria remain your only real protection against endless rounds of rework.

Before signing, plan for the end of the engagement at the start rather than at the end. Ask that the repository lives in your organisation from the first commit, and that the documentation is refreshed in every sprint. A provider confident in its own work says yes immediately; hesitation here reveals quite a lot.