Hiring an agency is a real commitment, and the stories about it going badly are common enough that they're worth taking seriously before you sign anything, not after the first missed deadline.
That friction is the actual signal they're thinking about how the thing gets built, not how the deal gets closed.
The tell that matters most
An agency that agrees to everything in the first meeting hasn't understood the project yet - they've just agreed to sell it. A team that genuinely understands software pushes back, asks about edge cases, and questions parts of the brief that don't quite hold together yet. That friction, uncomfortable as it can feel in a sales conversation, is the actual signal that they're thinking about how the thing gets built rather than how the deal gets closed.
Ask who actually writes the code
It's a fair and necessary question, and it's not one every agency wants to answer directly: is the person on this call the person who'll be doing the engineering, or a sales layer sitting in front of a team you'll never speak to? You want to be talking to the person who understands the actual technical tradeoffs of your project, not a relay who has to check with someone else for every answer.
What to check before signing
A short list that tends to catch the actual problems:
- How are scope changes handled - re-quoted and agreed, or silently absorbed into a ballooning timeline?
- What's the actual cadence of updates - a working demo you can open yourself, or a status document?
- What happens to the code, accounts, and infrastructure at the end - do you own all of it outright?
- Can they name a comparable project and explain what went wrong on it, not just what went right?
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