A quote that comes back within a day counts as a red flag rather than good service. A competent team returns a list of questions: about who owns the data and what happens on failure. A supplier that commits to a figure with no clarification is simply working from a template, and that guess will be corrected later — at your expense.
Look out for any distance between the people you meet and the people who will code. Insist on named engineers in the contract, flutter developer hourly rate with wording about substitutions. A vendor which is better laravel or ruby on rails that talks only about a pool of resources and hire fintech developers never names people is keeping its own flexibility at your cost.
Ask for access to the repository from day one. A team that hands over nothing between demos is asking you to trust a black box. Regular commits and pull requests tell you the actual pace far better than a slide deck. The same applies to the build and deployment setup: if nothing runs automatically, assurances about quality remain nothing more than words.
Vague wording in the contract around IP is rarely a formality. The contract must state plainly that all outputs produced under it become the property of your company upon settlement of the relevant invoice. Look too at which country's law applies and how payments are structured: a request for .net enterprise app development most of the money up front with no milestone tied to it eliminates the only leverage you have.
Last, examine communication. Confirm how much working-time overlap the teams will share each day, which person handles questions and on what response times. Four hours of overlap generally works; none at all converts each small question into a twenty-four hour round trip. Sloppy written English in the sales phase will not improve under delivery pressure.