How to Vet a Software Company Before You Sign

Most of the ways to evaluate a software vendor are easy for that vendor to control. Portfolios, testimonials, team pages and awards are all written by the company selling to you. The checks below are useful precisely because they are not.

Click every link

Open each project in the portfolio and see whether it loads. Sites go down, clients move on, and a portfolio full of dead links tells you something about both the work and how recently anyone looked at it.

Where a site does load, check whether it resembles the screenshot. Then look at the page source for the vendor's own credit, or ask the client. Agencies do sometimes display work they contributed a small part of.

Ask for the failure story

Ask for a reference from a project that went badly. Every company has one, and the response is more informative than the reference itself.

A team that says they have never had a difficult project is either new or not telling you the truth. A team that describes a specific problem, what it cost, and what they changed afterwards is showing you their behaviour under pressure, which is the thing you are actually buying.

Read the ownership clause before you sign

The contract should say that source code, designs, and infrastructure configuration transfer to you on final payment. Not "a licence to use". Not "the deliverables". The code.

Ask a second question too: where does the code live during development, and when do you get access? Getting a repository at the end is normal. Being unable to see it at all until then is worth questioning, because it means you cannot tell whether anything exists until the deadline.

Check hosting and domains as well. If your vendor registered the domain in their own name, moving away from them becomes a favour they have to grant rather than a decision you can make.

Find out who writes the code

Ask which specific person will lead your project and whether you will talk to them directly. In small agencies the answer is usually yes. In larger ones you may be introduced to a senior engineer during the pitch and handed to someone else afterwards.

Neither model is wrong, but you should know which one you are buying. The follow-up that gets an honest answer: "who will I be emailing in month three?"

Compare quotes on scope, not price

Two quotes for "an e-commerce website" can differ by a factor of five and both be reasonable, because one includes payment integration, stock management, and a year of support, and the other includes a template and five pages.

Ask every vendor to price the same written scope. If a quote is dramatically lower, find the line item the others included and it does not. Usually it is testing, or support, or the payment gateway work.

For reference, our own starting prices are published rather than quoted on request: a brochure site from NPR 25,000, a business website from NPR 40,000, an online store from NPR 60,000, and a custom web application from NPR 80,000. Those are floors for a defined scope, not estimates for your project.

What to ignore

Self-awarded superlatives. Any company can call itself the leading or most trusted anything, and none of it is verified by anyone. Ratings on directories the company paid to appear in carry a little more weight, but only a little.

Treat all of it as marketing and spend your time on the checks above instead. They take about an hour in total and they tell you far more.