Five questions to ask any software agency before you sign

A founder called us last year after another shop had built her a pricing tool. It worked in the demo. Three weeks after launch a supplier changed the format of a data feed, the tool started returning garbage, and nobody at the old shop would pick up. She had paid for software. What she needed was a team that would still be there when reality moved.

That gap is what these five questions are really about. Ask them of us, ask them of anyone you are considering. The answers tell you far more than a portfolio does.

Who owns the code and the data?

Ask it plainly and get it in writing. Some agencies keep the repository on their own accounts and hand you a running service, which means the day you want to leave, you are starting over. Others build on top of a platform you can never export from.

You should own the code, the data, and the accounts it all runs on. We set up repositories and cloud accounts in the client's name from day one and give ourselves access, rather than the other way around. If an agency hesitates here, that hesitation is the answer.

The test is simple: if you fired us tomorrow, could another team pick up the repo and keep going by Friday?

What happens when a source or a spec changes?

Most software does not break because the code was wrong. It breaks because the world it depended on moved. A partner renames a field. A regulation changes what you can store. You realise halfway through that the workflow you described is not the workflow your team actually uses.

Ask how they handle that. If the answer is a change-request process that treats every shift as a surprise and a new invoice, be careful. Change is the normal condition of software. We would rather agree up front that specs will move and build in the room to absorb it, so the first schema change does not turn into a negotiation.

What do you do when something breaks at 2am?

This is the question the pricing-tool founder wished she had asked. Find out, in concrete terms:

• Who gets paged, and how fast do they respond
• Whether there is monitoring that catches failures before your customers do
• What the arrangement is once the build is handed over

There is no single correct answer here. A small internal tool does not need someone on call overnight. A system that takes payments does. What matters is that the agency has thought about it and can tell you the real plan, instead of going quiet when you raise it. Silence on this usually means there is no plan.

How do you price the first stage?

We think the first stage should be a fixed price for a defined piece of work, and we have written separately about why. The short version is that open-ended time-and-materials from the start puts all the risk on you before anyone knows the shape of the problem.

Whatever model an agency uses, ask them to defend it. A good answer connects the price to something concrete: a scoped pilot, a working slice you can judge, a clear line for what is in and what is not. A weak answer is a day rate and a shrug about how long it might take. You are allowed to ask what happens if they are wrong about the estimate, and who carries that.

Can I talk to a past client?

Portfolios show the wins. A phone call with someone who has lived with the work for a year shows you the rest: whether the team communicated when things slipped, whether they stuck around after launch, whether the thing still runs.

Any agency worth signing has a few clients who will take that call. If they cannot produce one, or if every reference is a project that shipped last month and has no track record yet, notice that. Ask the reference the boring questions. Did they respond when you emailed? Did the estimate hold? Would you hire them again?

None of these five questions are about technology. They are about whether the people you are hiring will treat your problem as theirs after the invoice is paid. The founder with the pricing tool eventually got it running again. The fix took an afternoon. The reason it took three weeks to get to that afternoon was that she had hired a vendor when she needed an owner, and there is no clause in a contract that fixes that after the fact. You find it out by asking first.