Every full-stack development company will say yes to your project. Very few can actually deliver. This is the 12-question checklist we help clients use to filter proposals — the same one we happily answer ourselves.
1. Do they own front-end, back-end, DevOps, and QA under one team?
"Full-stack" means the whole stack. If they hand off DevOps to a separate vendor, they are a front-and-back team, not full-stack. Ask specifically who runs CI/CD and infrastructure. A missing answer here becomes a missing production system three months in.
2. Can they name the last three projects they shipped, with tech, scope, and outcome?
If not, they haven't shipped much. If they can only describe in generalities ("a large SaaS platform for a Fortune 500"), you are being sold. Real teams talk about specific stacks, specific integrations, specific launch metrics.
3. What does their process look like for the first four weeks?
Good answer: kick-off, discovery, architecture, UX prototypes, first working sprint by end of week 4. Bad answer: "we'll figure that out after signing." Vendors who can't describe their own process cannot deliver yours.
4. Which stacks do they go deep in?
Every serious team has 2-3 stacks they know cold and can name (e.g., MERN + .NET + Python) — plus a shorter list they touch occasionally. Someone who claims deep expertise in every framework is either lying or reselling. Match their deep stack to your project.
5. How do they handle scope change mid-build?
Every project has scope change. A serious team has a change-order process that keeps them honest — light-touch (rounded to sprints), transparent, with an audit trail. "We're flexible" without a process means unpredictable pricing.
6. Who exactly is on the team, and can you interview them?
Ask for the engineers by name and role, and interview at least the tech lead and one senior. Bait-and-switch — where you sign with senior engineers and get juniors — is the single most common vendor failure mode. Interviewing pre-signing kills it.
7. What's their approach to code ownership and hand-off?
You should own 100% of the source, in your own repositories, with documentation, tests, and a runbook. If the vendor "holds" the code, or the license is unclear, walk away. Every code line they write should live in your GitHub / GitLab from day one.
8. What testing and QA is included?
Unit tests are minimum. Integration and E2E tests should be part of the deliverable for any non-trivial build. "Manual QA at end" is a red flag — bugs found manually at end are 10x more expensive to fix.
9. What does DevOps and cloud look like?
Ask specifically: which cloud, which regions, IaC yes/no, CI/CD yes/no, monitoring and alerting yes/no. If the answer is "we'll deploy at the end," you will inherit an unreliable production system. Serious teams ship with Docker, Terraform, and CI/CD from sprint one.
10. How do they price, and what happens if the estimate is wrong?
Fixed-scope is fair for well-defined MVPs. Time-and-material is fair for evolving products. Watch out for teams that price fixed-scope on 20% discovery — that risk premium comes back as scope-fight or corner-cutting. Discuss risk explicitly before signing.
11. What's the escalation path when something goes wrong?
Something will go wrong. A missed deadline, a bug in production, a team member leaving. Ask for the actual escalation path — the human who is accountable, the SLA, the communication channel. Vendors who avoid the question tend to disappear when the question becomes real.
12. What happens after launch?
Serious teams offer a support retainer with named engineers, response-time SLAs, and a way to add small features monthly. "We'll be around if you need us" means you'll be around finding a new vendor in six months.
Ten red flags that should end the conversation
- Can't name the specific engineers who will work on it.
- Fixed-price quote before any discovery.
- "We do everything" with equal fluency.
- No case studies with real specifics.
- Won't sign a mutual NDA.
- Deliverable code lives on their infrastructure, not yours.
- No testing in the SOW.
- No CI/CD or IaC in the delivery.
- Insists on 50%+ payment upfront.
- Won't put a communication cadence or SLA in writing.
How to compare proposals apples-to-apples
Send every vendor the same one-page scoping document with your business outcome, must-have features, integrations, non-functional requirements, and target timeline. Ask for the same deliverable format back — scope, team composition, timeline, price, assumptions. Anything that doesn't fit those five sections is padding.
Then score them 1-5 on each of the 12 questions above. The top scorer usually wins on delivery, not on price. Ninety percent of software project failures we've been called in to fix started with a cheaper vendor whose delivery process didn't exist.
Recommendation
Full-stack means end-to-end accountability. Hire that, and the rest of the project gets easier. Hire a team of specialists you have to stitch together yourself, and you'll be doing the integration work you paid a vendor to do. If you want to run this checklist on a real conversation with us, book a call — no pitch, straight answers.