27 June 2026 · 4 min read
Ask about the last project that went badly
Every agency has one. The useful signal is whether they can describe it specifically, what they changed afterwards, and whether they take a share of the responsibility.
A vendor with no failures either has no history or no candour.
Ask who actually writes the code
Sales engineers in the pitch and junior engineers on delivery is a common pattern. Ask to meet the people who will be on your project and check their availability start date.
Ask for the team's other concurrent commitments. Full-time on paper often means forty percent in practice.
Ask what you own at the end
Repository access, infrastructure accounts, deployment credentials, and documentation should be yours throughout, not handed over at the end.
If leaving the vendor would be operationally painful, that pain is the product of a deliberate choice. Check the contract for it.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing a development partner for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us