How to choose a software agency: 10 questions to ask

The two things buyers look at most when choosing a software agency are the portfolio and the price. Both mislead: a portfolio shows you finished work, not the process that produced it, and a price cannot be compared until you know what it includes.

The questions below are written to be asked in a pitch meeting. What they have in common is that the answers cannot be dodged. A good agency answers all ten without preparation. An agency that cannot has never thought about that part of the work.

1 · Who writes the scope, and when?

If you write the scope, the risk is yours. If the agency writes it, that is work and it costs money.

The answer you want: discovery is bought as a separate, small engagement, its output is a written scope document, and the fixed price comes after that. An agency that quotes a fixed price without seeing a scope has priced its uncertainty as a risk premium — covered in detail in software development pricing.

2 · Whose name goes on the repo, the servers and the third-party accounts?

There is exactly one right answer: yours. The agency is granted access; it does not own the assets.

If the answer is “we handle all that, don’t worry about it”, translate it politely: your exit cost will be unbounded. Leaving this out of the contract is the most expensive mistake to fix later.

3 · Will I see a working build every two weeks?

Not a status report — a working build. Something you can open in a browser and click.

“A demo once a month” or “we’ll hand it over when it’s done” means problems are being saved for the end. In software, everything learned late is expensive, and regular delivery is the only way to learn early.

4 · Do you write tests, and how much?

“Yes, we write tests” is not an answer. Ask what they test.

A reasonable reply: critical flows end to end, anything touching money or permissions covered by unit tests. A claim of “100% coverage” is either an exaggeration or a waste — both are bad signs.

5 · How do you deploy, and how does a rollback work?

An agency that pushes files to a server over FTP does not know what it will do when something needs undoing.

What you want to hear: every change merged to the main branch passes automated tests and quality gates, goes to a preview environment, and reaches production after approval; if something breaks, the previous version is one step away. That setup is its own piece of work, and it is a one-off.

6 · Who will actually work on this, by name?

The senior architect in the pitch meeting is not always the person on the project.

Put names and allocations in the contract. “Two people full time” can just as easily be two people who look at it three days a month. Seniority should show up in the rate too — with a single blended day rate you cannot tell where your work went.

7 · Have you done this before — and what don’t you do?

The second half is the more useful question. An agency that says yes to everything is either very large or not being straight with you.

A good answer draws a line: “We’ve done a lot of payment integrations; we don’t write mobile apps.” An agency that knows its limits will tell you when it reaches one.

8 · How long do you fix defects after delivery?

There should be a standard warranty period, and what it covers should be in writing: defect fixes are covered, new features are not.

With no warranty period, every problem after the delivery date becomes a fresh negotiation.

9 · If you walked away tomorrow, what would I have?

The answer should include: repository access, a setup and deployment document, the list of environment variables, a short record of architectural decisions, and an inventory of third-party accounts.

If it does not, no handover has been planned. On a project with no handover, switching agencies is the same thing as rewriting it.

10 · What does maintenance cover, and what does it cost per month?

Software is not finished on the day it ships. Dependencies age, security patches land, and backups need verifying that they actually restore.

If maintenance is missing from the quote, it is not going to happen — and it comes back a year later as a security problem.

How to read the answers

Put three agencies’ answers to these ten questions side by side. You are not looking for the best answers — you are looking for the fewest evasions.

An agency that says “I don’t know, let me check” is safer than one that says “of course we can do that” to everything. The most valuable sentence you will hear during a project is “we didn’t anticipate this”; the team that can say it early costs far less than the team that says it at the end.

If you are not yet sure whether an agency, a freelancer or your own team is the right model, start with the comparison of the three; what a software agency does and does not do is covered separately.

If you want to prepare your own side before asking these questions, how to write the brief is covered separately. If you are holding a half-finished project, the takeover decision works differently.

If the software has to talk to accounting and e-invoicing systems, see integration too.

If you want to work out the scope together, let’s set up a call. The budget side is covered separately.