The questions to ask before you sign with a development agency

A sales call is designed to make a studio look good, and every studio is prepared for the questions you are expecting to ask. These are the ones that are cheap to answer honestly and awkward to answer otherwise, which is the only property that makes a question useful.

We answer all fourteen of these on our own first calls. If a studio bristles at any of them, that reaction is the answer.

About the people who will actually do the work

1. Who specifically will write the code, and can I meet them before signing? The commonest disappointment in this industry is meeting seniors at the pitch and getting juniors on the project.
2. Can those people be swapped without my agreement? A reasonable answer allows changes with notice and consultation. "Resourcing is at our discretion" means you are buying capacity, not a team.
3. How many other projects will they be on at the same time? An engineer split across three clients is not giving you a third of their attention; context switching costs more than that.
4. Who do I talk to when something is wrong at 6pm on a Friday? You want a name, not a support process.

About the money

1. What is explicitly not included in this price? The lines most commonly missing are discovery, QA, deployment and monitoring, and the sprint after launch. Together those are a large share of a realistic build — what quotes leave out has the detail.
2. What happens if it takes longer than you estimated? Under fixed price, the honest answer is that overrun is theirs. If the answer involves you paying more for the same agreed scope, it is not a fixed price.
3. What counts as a change request, and who decides? Ask for an example of something they would treat as in scope and something they would not. Vagueness here is where budgets go.
4. What will it cost to run once it is live? A studio that has not thought about your infrastructure bill has not thought about your business. What it costs to run a SaaS is the shape of that answer.

About ownership, which is where companies get hurt

1. Whose name is on the repository, the cloud account and the domain — from day one? The answer should be yours, in writing, from the first commit. Anything else is leverage held over you.
2. If we part ways in week three, what do I have? A good answer is: everything built so far, running, with access. A bad answer involves a handover process that begins after final payment.
3. Is there anything proprietary in here that I can only maintain through you? In-house frameworks are sometimes genuinely good and always a lock-in question worth asking out loud.

About whether they will tell you the truth

1. Tell me about a project that went badly, and what you changed afterwards. Everyone has one. A studio claiming otherwise is either new or not being straight, and both are worth knowing.
2. What would make you turn this project down? An answer means they have standards. "We can build anything" means they will take your money and find out.
3. What part of what I have described do you think I should cut? The most valuable answer of the fourteen. A studio that cannot name anything to remove is either not listening or is happy to bill for scope you do not need.

Answers that should end the conversation

• "We'll transfer the code at the end." It should be yours from the beginning.
• "We can start Monday" with no scoping. Nobody can price work they have not examined; you will meet the real number later.
• A quote far below the others with no explanation of what is excluded. Something has been left out, and it is usually QA and deployment.
• Refusing to name the engineers, or being evasive about which legal entity signs.
• No mention of what happens after launch. The first weeks with real users are when a product either gets fixed or quietly dies.

One question to ask yourself

Can you describe, in two sentences, what this product must do and for whom? If not, no studio can price it accurately, and the good ones will tell you that rather than guessing. That is what discovery is for, and it is cheaper than a build aimed at the wrong target.

How to write a spec an agency can quote from covers getting to those two sentences before you start calling anyone.

What we do

Every one of these has an answer on our first call, including the uncomfortable ones. You own the code and the accounts from the first commit, the scope and price are written down before anything is built, and you will be told which part of your idea to cut.

If what you need is a freelancer, a different kind of firm, or nothing yet, you will hear that too — see agency, freelancer or in-house for how that decision usually goes.

Frequently asked questions