Start with relevant experience, not the size of the portfolio. Request three or four case studies that resemble your domain and your stack, and then find out which engineers actually built it. A solid partner is happy to connect you with the tech lead. Evasive answers at this stage almost always mean the demo work came from somewhere else.
The contract needs more attention than the sales deck. Three sections matter more than the rest: ownership of the code, confidentiality, and exit terms and handover. All the work product must transfer to you on payment, together with designs, scripts and infrastructure configuration. Be careful with language that leaves so-called reusable libraries outside the transfer, because that is often the part you cannot replace later.
Ask where their numbers come from. An honest estimate arrives with a list of assumptions, a task-level breakdown and a range rather than a single number. A fixed-bid deal is only reasonable when the scope is genuinely frozen; in any other case the supplier pads the number and you pay for hire freelance pyspark developer it anyway. A time-and-materials model moves the risk back to the client, so it needs visible weekly reporting choosing between laravel and node js a spending cap.
How the work is run beats dedicated team vs freelance developer size. Establish what happens when the scope changes, who writes the acceptance criteria and how quality assurance works. A team will be able to show you running software development for fintech rather than status reports. Written acceptance criteria remain the only reliable protection against the it-was-never-in-scope conversation.
Before signing, think about the day you no longer need this vendor at the start rather than at the end. Insist that the code repository stays in your organisation from the first commit, and that the documentation is refreshed in every sprint. A partner who is comfortable with this says yes immediately; a long negotiation over it reveals most of what you need to know.
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