How to pick a reliable IT vendor: 7 questions every owner should ask before signing

Pick the wrong IT vendor and you redo your site in six months — or lose your source code and domain entirely. SME owners aren't engineers, but these 7 questions filter out 80% of bad actors. Run them past any vendor; if they answer all 7 clearly, you've got a starting candidate.

1. Are their past projects still live?

Ask for 3 active project URLs and click through. Named clients with live links — and clients still using the work — prove they ship and clients stay. If their portfolio is all "confidential" with screenshots and no links, be cautious; the demo may have gone dark.

2. Does the quote break into phases?

Lump-sum quotes invite mid-project surcharges and make budgeting hard. Reliable vendors split projects into phases (design / dev / test / launch / optimise), priced and delivered independently. You can stop after phase 1 if unhappy — no need to eat the whole contract.

3. Do they support you after launch?

Ask about maintenance SLAs, bug-fix turnaround, downtime response, on-call. Rule out anyone who disappears after go-live — your system runs continuously, not just at launch. Ideal contract terms: critical bugs acknowledged in 4 hours, fixed in 24.

4. Who owns the source code and access?

Contracts must state: source code repo (GitHub/GitLab), domain, server credentials (VPS/AWS/Cloudflare), third-party services (Stripe, SendGrid) all belong to you. Otherwise switching vendors becomes hostage negotiation — they lock access, your business stops.

5. What's the tech stack? Mainstream or proprietary?

Mainstream open source tools (Laravel, Flutter, React, Vue) have plenty of devs in the market — easy to switch teams. In-house frameworks, proprietary CMS, undocumented internal tools mean lock-in. Ten years later you'll still be calling them to add features.

6. How is communication structured?

Weekly progress calls? Demo checkpoints? Slack, WhatsApp or email? Projects without clear milestones, vendors who go silent for days, end-of-month "overall updates" — these go off the rails 90% of the time. Aim for weekly 30-min standups plus a monthly demo.

7. Does company size match your project?

Big firms outsource to junior freelancers — quality uncontrolled, comms chain long, cost high. Tiny firms vanish when one person leaves. Ask who specifically works on your project, how long they've been there, who backs them up.

We answer all 7 ourselves and will tell you our size, stack and what past projects of ours are still live. WhatsApp for a free 30-min review with a live demo — judge for yourself. We'll also tell you up front when we're not the right fit — small teams aren't built for enterprise procurement, and pure backend ERP integration isn't our strength.