Agency evaluation cheat-sheet

Yes. They send a deliverables list with acceptance criteria per item, plus what’s explicitly out of scope. Often part of a Statement of Work.

‘We’ll cover that in the SOW’ but they can’t show you a sample. Vague verbs like ‘support’, ‘enable’, ‘optimise’.

‘A working website’ or ‘an MVP’ as the deliverable. No acceptance criteria. The proposal reads like marketing copy.

They name 5–10 things that are NOT included (analytics, SEO, content writing, hosting, accessibility audit, etc.) so you know what to budget separately.

‘We’ll handle whatever comes up’ — sounds generous, costs you double when they invoice for everything.

Refuse to answer or laugh it off. They want scope ambiguity because they price overruns at premium rates.

They send a redacted SOW. Specific artefacts (Figma file, repo URL, runbook, hand-off doc), milestone dates, dollar amounts per phase.

‘We can put one together’ but nothing exists. They build the SOW around the contract, not vice versa.

No SOW exists. They sell time & materials with a ‘rough estimate’ and reserve the right to invoice anything.

Names. LinkedIn URLs. Years on the specific stack. A clear split between seniors (designing the system) and juniors (implementing slices). Senior time is at least 30–40% of total hours.

‘A team of 4–6 people’ but no names, no LinkedIn, no specifics. The tech lead ‘will be assigned’ once you sign.

Account manager pitches everything. The actual builders are ‘their team’ (often offshore subcontractors at $20/hr re-billed to you at $150/hr).

Honest answer: ‘I lead architecture and review every PR, day-to-day code is by [named person]’. Or: ‘I write the first 3 weeks then hand off’. Either is fine — clarity is what matters.

‘I’ll be involved’ — the dodge of the decade.

‘I’ll be on every call’ (= zero engineering, you’re paying for sales-engineering theatre).

They show you a real CR template. Estimate in days, fixed price for the change, written approval before work starts. They quote the last actual example by phase and amount.

‘We’re flexible’ — translation: invoices appear for whatever they think they did.

No process. Or ‘we just get on with it and reconcile at the end’. That’s where the 30%–80% budget overruns come from.

They say no, send a CR, give you a number, start work only after approval. They’ll tell you a story where they pushed back on a client and the project landed on time.

‘We try to accommodate’ — they’ll absorb 5 hours, then surprise-invoice 20.

‘Whatever you need’ — sounds great until you realise they were never going to deliver original scope on time, but now have a paper trail of you ‘changing your mind’.

They explain the trade-off clearly. Recommend fixed-price + change requests for well-defined work, capped T&M for discovery phases. Match the model to the unknowns, not their cash flow.

‘Whatever you prefer’ — they’ll quote whichever maximises their margin once you’ve committed.

Pure T&M with no cap, no burn-rate updates, no commitment to a deliverable date.

Specific answer per pricing model. Fixed-price → they eat it. T&M → you do, but only against a written cap and weekly burn reports. They’ve eaten an overage before and can tell you about it.

‘We work it out’ — translation: you pay every hour they spent, even the ones that fixed their own bugs.

‘That’s why we don’t do fixed price’ or ‘overruns are usually due to client changes’ — pre-emptive blame-shifting.

Specific number (e.g. ‘unit + integration on critical paths, ~70% coverage on business logic, e2e on the 5 user-facing flows that matter’). DoD is written and includes tests, docs, deploy, and a code review by a named person.

‘We test as we go’ — usually means manual click-through by whoever has time.

‘QA is at the end before launch’ — costs 3x more, ships with bugs anyway.

Repo URL, runbook, env-var list, deployment URL, monitoring access, and 30 days of post-launch support. They’ve offboarded clients before and can describe the exact handover packet.

‘We provide documentation’ — but they can’t show you what ‘documentation’ means.

‘You’d want to keep us on retainer for that’ — handover is intentionally painful so you can’t leave.

You. Code in your GitHub org from commit one. All accounts in your name with you as owner, them as collaborator. Written into the contract.

‘You own everything at the end’ — the end is when you’ve paid the final invoice. If anything goes wrong, they hold the code hostage.

They host the repo, the accounts, and the deployment under their org. ‘We’ll transfer it when the project is complete.’ (They never do, cleanly.)

No, or yes-with-honest-disclosure: ‘we use [X], it’s MIT-licensed, here’s how to take it over without us’. Default-stack: Next.js, Postgres, standard CMS (Contentful, Sanity, Strapi).

‘We use our own internal framework but it’s based on React’ — translation: nobody else can maintain it.

Custom CMS, custom build pipeline, undocumented internal libraries — designed to make leaving expensive.

Three names, phone numbers, project type, and yes, one that went sideways. ‘We over-ran by 6 weeks, here’s what we did, here’s what the client said.’ That’s a real agency.

‘We’ll send you references’ — and then send you logos on a slide. Or one cherry-picked friend-of-the-CEO.

Refuse references. ‘NDA’ as a blanket excuse. No willingness to share even the negative case study.