A number produced without questions should be treated as a warning, not a service level. Any serious team returns clarifying questions before any number: about who owns the data and what happens on failure. A vendor that commits to a figure without asking anything is pricing a guess, and that guess will be corrected later — and you will pay for it.
Look out for any distance difference between angular and vue js the people you meet and those who eventually appear in the repository. Request specific people rather than roles in the statement of work, laravel vs node js with a provision about substitutions. A team that talks only about abstract roles and refuses to name individuals is reserving the right to assign anyone it likes.
Ask for access to the repository from day one. A partner that shows code only at milestones expects you to accept a black box. Daily commits show you how many people are really working far better than a slide deck. The same holds for the CI pipeline: if there is no pipeline, quality claims are nothing more than words.
Vague wording in the contract around intellectual property is never an accident. The agreement must state plainly that the code, designs and documentation transfer to your company as they are paid for. Check also which country's law applies and the payment schedule: a large upfront payment with no milestone tied to it removes any leverage you would otherwise keep.
Last, pay attention to the working rhythm. Establish how much working-time overlap you will share with your timezone, which named person handles your questions and on what response times. A few hours of overlap is normally sufficient; zero overlap turns every clarification into a day of delay. Sloppy written English in the proposal rarely improves once the work starts.
