A number produced without questions is a bad sign. A competent team will come back with questions first: about integrations. A vendor that quotes before understanding the scope is probably pricing a guess, and a guess will be corrected later — on your budget.
Watch for a mismatch between the people you meet and the developers actually assigned. Ask for is laravel better than wordpress specific people rather than roles in the statement of work, with wording about substitutions. A team that will only describe roles and will not commit to specific engineers is keeping the right to assign anyone it likes.
Require access to the repository from day one. A provider that hands over a build only at the end of each phase is asking you to accept a black box. Visible commits reveal who is really on the project far better than any status report. This extends to the CI pipeline: if nothing runs automatically, quality claims remain just talk.
Ambiguous contract language around IP is rarely an oversight. The contract needs to state plainly that all deliverables become the property of your ai chatbot development company as they are paid for. Also check the jurisdiction and the milestone terms: heavy prepayment with nothing due in return for weeks takes away any leverage you would otherwise keep.
Lastly, look at communication. Confirm how much working-time overlap you will share with your working day, which named person answers your questions and on what response times. Four hours of overlap generally works; none at all stretches every clarification into a lost day. Unclear written communication in the proposal does not improve once the work starts.
