Choosing badly here is expensive in a way that is hard to see at the time. The invoice is not the loss — the loss is nine months spent, a system nobody uses, and a codebase the next team says should be rewritten. These are the things worth checking before signing.
Watch how they respond to a vague brief
Send the same short description to every company you are considering. The ones that reply with a price have told you they will discover the real scope later, at your cost. The ones that reply with questions — how many roles, which integrations, how much existing data, what happens in the exception case — are doing the work that keeps a project on budget.
Ask who owns what, in writing
- Is the source code handed over, and at which milestone?
- Whose name is on the domain, hosting, app store and gateway accounts?
- Are third-party licences bought in your name or theirs?
- If you stopped working together tomorrow, what would you physically have?
There is nothing wrong with a company hosting and maintaining your system. There is a great deal wrong with discovering that you cannot leave.
Ask to see work in progress, not just finished screens
Polished screenshots prove a designer was involved. Ask instead how you will see progress during the project: a staging link you can open every week is a very different commitment from a demo at the end. If the answer is 'we will show you when it is ready', you have no control until it is too late to steer.
Find out what happens after launch
- 01How long is the warranty on defects, and what counts as a defect rather than a change?
- 02What is the response time when the system is down on a working day?
- 03Is there a support agreement, what does it cover, and what does it cost per year?
- 04Who is responsible for security updates and framework upgrades?
- 05How are small change requests handled — hourly, a monthly allowance, or a new quote each time?
Warning signs
- Agreeing to every requirement without once suggesting something be cut or deferred
- A fixed price for a scope that has never been written down
- No named point of contact, or a different person in every meeting
- Reluctance to put code ownership and handover in the contract
- A timeline noticeably shorter than everyone else quoted for the same brief
- Estimates that never change even as you add requirements
Start small, on purpose
Where the budget allows, buy a paid discovery phase first — a written specification, a module breakdown and an estimate — as a standalone piece of work. It is a fraction of the project cost, you own the document, and you learn how the company thinks before committing to nine months with them. If the specification is good, you can even take it elsewhere.