A number produced without questions should be treated as a bad sign. A competent team responds with questions first: about users and volumes. A provider that quotes before understanding the scope is simply pricing a guess, startup mvp development agency and a guess becomes a change request later — and you will pay for it.
Be wary of a gap between the people you meet and those who eventually appear in the repository. Ask for the names and CVs of the actual team in the contract, with wording that requires notice before anyone is swapped. A offshore development team for moscow that will only describe roles and nodejs development services never names specific engineers is keeping the option to staff you with whoever is free.
Require commit-level visibility from the start. A provider that delivers nothing between demos expects you to accept a black box. Regular commits and pull requests tell you who is really on the project far better than a slide deck. The same applies to the automated test suite: if there is no pipeline, quality claims are unverifiable.
Loose phrasing around IP is rarely an oversight. The document needs to state plainly that all outputs produced under it become the property of the client upon settlement of the relevant invoice. Look too at the jurisdiction and the milestone terms: heavy prepayment with no milestone tied to it takes away the only leverage you have.
Finally, look at communication. Ask how much working-time overlap you will share with your working day, who handles day-to-day questions and within what time. Some genuine overlap is normally sufficient; no overlap converts a five-minute question into a day of delay. Careless writing in the sales phase will not improve under delivery pressure.
Recent Comments