47 questions to ask before you hire anyone to build your SaaS

Do not read all 47 down a call. You will sound like a procurement form and you will learn less, because the useful signal is in how someone thinks, not in whether they have a prepared answer.

Pick twelve

Choose two or three from each section that map to your actual risk. If you are non-technical, weight ownership and quality. If you have a hard deadline, weight price and process. If the provider is a team rather than a person, weight who does the work.

Ask the open ones first

Start with question 1 — "describe my product back to me in one sentence." It is the highest-signal question in the list and it takes ten seconds. Someone who repeats your feature list has not understood the product. Someone who tells you what it is for, and what they would cut, has.

Listen for the shape of the answer, not the content

• Specifics beat reassurance. "Yes, we handle that" is not an answer; "here is how we handled it on X" is.
• Volunteered downsides are the strongest possible signal. Anyone who tells you unprompted what could go wrong has done this before.
• Watch for the pivot to sales. A question about ownership answered with a paragraph about their process is a no.
• A slow, honest "I do not know, I would need to check" beats a fast confident wrong answer every time.

Most bad answers are fixable with a better contract. These five are not, and you save yourself months by walking away the moment you hear one.

1. 1"We keep the code until final payment, then transfer it." Payment terms are fine; hostage terms are not. The repository should be in your organisation from day one, with commits landing in it as work happens. Anything else means a dispute leaves you with nothing.
2. 2"We use our own internal framework, it makes us faster." It makes them necessary. You will not be able to hire anyone else to maintain it, and that is the point of the arrangement.
3. 3"We can't tell you who will work on it until we start." You are buying a specific person's judgement. If they cannot name them, you are buying whoever is unallocated that month.
4. 4"We'll figure out the exact scope as we go." Without a written scope, there is no such thing as late and no such thing as out of scope. Time-and-materials work is legitimate — but only with a technical counterpart on your side who can tell you when to stop.
5. 5"Testing and deployment are a separate phase we can quote later." Software that is not deployed is not finished. If shipping is a separate line item, the quote you are comparing is not for a working product.