The uncomfortable part of choosing a software development company is that on the day you decide, the excellent one and the merely persuasive one look the same. Both will answer your questions well. Both have a portfolio. Both have a case study with a number in it. Both are personable on the call, because being personable on the call is the one skill every agency has.
What separates them is not the answers they have prepared, it is how they handle the ones they have not. So the questions below are chosen for that: each is easy for a good agency and awkward for a bad one. Ask them in the first conversation, before anyone has written a proposal, and write down what you hear.
Why the first call decides more than you think
By the time a proposal arrives, both sides are invested and the conversation has changed shape. You are comparing documents rather than assessing people, and documents are written by whoever is best at writing documents.
The first call is the last moment when you can ask anything without it feeling like a negotiation. Use it. And notice that you are not really testing knowledge here, you are testing two things: whether they have done this often enough to have opinions, and whether they will tell you something you do not want to hear.
Questions to ask a software development company about process
These reveal whether they have a way of working or improvise each time.
- What happens in the first two weeks? A good answer is specific and mostly about understanding rather than building. A bad answer starts with design.
- How will I see progress? You want something working, regularly, that you can click. Weekly is normal. A monthly status document is not progress, it is a description of progress.
- What do you need from me, and when? If they cannot answer this, the project will stall on your side and it will be framed as your fault. Good agencies know exactly what they will be waiting on.
- Who is actually doing the work? Names, and whether the people on this call are among them. The classic failure is meeting the senior team at the pitch and never seeing them again.
- What happens when we disagree about whether something is a bug or a change? Everyone hits this. A good answer describes how it is decided. A bad one says it will not come up.
Questions about ownership
The most important group, and the one people skip because it feels distrustful this early. It is not: it is the ordinary question a buyer asks about what they are buying.
- Who owns the code when we have paid? Only one acceptable answer, and it should come without hesitation or conditions.
- Whose name is on the domain and the hosting account? Yours. If they offer to hold either as a convenience, decline politely. Convenience is how this goes wrong, not malice.
- If we part company, what do we walk away with, and how? A good answer is a handover: repository access, credentials, documentation, a call. A vague answer here is the single best predictor of a painful ending.
- Are you using anything we would have to keep paying you for? Proprietary components, a platform only they can deploy to, a licence in their name. Not automatically wrong, but you must know before, not after.
- What is in place so that one person leaving does not strand us? Applies to their business and yours. The answer reveals whether knowledge is written down or living in one head.
If any of those five produce hedging, that is your answer about the whole engagement. Who owns your website covers what to check and how to recover it if you have already been caught.
Questions about honesty
These are the ones that actually distinguish, because they cannot be answered well from a script.
- What would you talk me out of? The best question on this list. Anyone experienced answers immediately, because everyone has watched a client spend money on the wrong thing. Anyone who says it all sounds great is selling.
- Tell me about a project that went badly and what you changed afterwards. You are listening for specifics and for ownership. An answer where the client was the problem, twice, tells you what they will say about you.
- What are you not good at? A real agency has a real answer, usually about a technology or a size of client. No weaknesses means either no self-awareness or no candour.
- Can I speak to a client from two years ago rather than a recent one? Recent clients are happy by default. Year two is when the invoice is smaller and the request is inconvenient, and that is the behaviour you are buying.
- What is your estimate most likely to be wrong about? A good answer names the uncertain part before you have paid for it. A confident number with no caveats is not confidence, it is a bet you are underwriting.
Questions about what happens after launch
Most people ask nothing here, and it is where most of the regret lives. The build is weeks. Everything after it is years.
- Who supports this in six months, and how do I reach them? A named route, not an address someone checks occasionally.
- How quickly do you respond when something is broken? You want a stated response time and honesty about what it does not cover. Be sceptical of anyone promising the site will never go down, because nobody controls that.
- What does it cost to run per year? Hosting, domain, licences, updates, support. An agency that has not thought past launch is quoting you a project rather than a relationship.
- What can we change ourselves, and what must come back to you? If every text change is billable, you have bought a dependency. Sometimes that is right, but choose it knowingly.
- What will need attention in two years even if we change nothing? Dependencies age, platforms deprecate things, certificates expire. A good answer is unglamorous and specific, and it tells you they have run software for a while rather than only shipped it.
What good and bad answers sound like
| Question | A good answer sounds like | A bad answer sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| What would you talk me out of? | An immediate, specific example, usually costing them money. | Everything you have described sounds great. |
| Who owns the code? | You do, on final payment, and it is in the contract. | We look after all of that for you. |
| What is the estimate most likely to be wrong about? | Names the uncertain piece and how they would handle it. | A single confident number with no caveats. |
| What are you not good at? | A genuine limitation, sometimes with a referral elsewhere. | We are full service. |
| Who is doing the work? | Names, roles, and who you will speak to weekly. | Our team will be assigned at kickoff. |
| How do we part company? | A handover process they have clearly done before. | That has never happened. |
Red flags, regardless of the answers
- A quote before any questions about your business. They are pricing a template.
- Pressure to sign this week. A discount that expires is a sales technique, not a constraint.
- Promises about search rankings. Nobody controls those, so the promise is either a misunderstanding or worse.
- Reluctance to put things in writing. The most reliable warning sign there is. Serious suppliers find this normal.
- Nothing but praise for your plan. Comfortable, and it means either they have not thought about it or they will not tell you when you are wrong.
- A price far below everyone else. Occasionally a portfolio-builder and a genuine bargain. More often someone who has not understood the job, and the gap comes back as change requests or as an unfinished project.
One more thing worth doing
Before a large commitment, buy a small one. A single page, a fix, a defined improvement, at a fair price with a real deadline. You learn what no reference call will tell you: whether they reply promptly, hit a date, explain things without condescension, write tidy work underneath, and how they behave when something goes slightly wrong. A few hundred pounds against a five-figure decision, and a refusal to do one is itself an answer. How to find a reliable web developer covers the same ground for a smaller job.
Not for you if
The reason to ask these before a proposal rather than after is that afterwards you will be reading documents, and every agency's document says the same things. These questions are the only part of the process where you get to see how someone reasons in real time. That is the thing you are actually buying.