Hiring a web development company is one of the highest-leverage decisions a small business makes. Get it right and you have a working product, on time, that you can maintain and grow. Get it wrong and you have a half-finished site, a vendor who has gone quiet, and the task of starting over.
The difference between the two outcomes is almost never technical skill. Most agencies can build what you need. The difference is process, communication, and what happens when something goes wrong.
These five questions separate the agencies that are serious from the ones that are not.
1. Who will actually work on my project?
The most common bait-and-switch in the industry: you meet a senior developer in the sales call, and a junior developer you have never met builds your product.
Ask directly: who will be the primary developer on this project? Can I speak with them before we sign? A good agency will say yes without hesitation. The developer and project manager you meet in the sales process should be the ones doing the work.
Also ask: what is your team size? If an agency has three people and five active projects, someone is stretched thin. That someone is usually you.
2. Can I see the code from a recent project?
Not a live website — the code. A portfolio of URLs tells you very little about code quality. What matters is whether the work is maintainable, whether it follows established conventions, whether it will be readable to the next developer who touches it.
Most agencies will share a sanitised repository or a private GitHub link under NDA. If a vendor refuses entirely, that is a signal. They either do not use version control properly or they are not proud of what they ship.
What to look for if you are not a developer: ask a developer friend to spend 15 minutes reading the code and give you an honest verdict. You do not need to understand every line. You need to know whether someone who does understand it considers it clean work.
3. What does post-launch support actually cover?
“We provide support” means nothing. Get specifics in writing:
- How long does the warranty period last?
- What counts as a bug (your responsibility) versus a new feature (billed separately)?
- What is the response time for critical issues — hours, days, weeks?
- Is support included in the project price or billed at an hourly rate?
The weeks after a launch are when bugs surface. A vendor who disappears at handover — or charges premium rates for every small fix — will cost you more than their initial quote saved.
4. What happens if the project goes over scope?
It will. Requirements change. Something you thought was simple turns out to be complex. A third-party API behaves differently than expected.
Ask the vendor how they handle this. Two honest answers exist:
- Fixed-price change requests: any scope change is quoted separately before work begins. Predictable, but can slow things down.
- Time and materials for overruns: you pay an hourly rate for work beyond the original scope. Faster, but requires trust and clear logging.
An agency that tells you scope never changes is not being honest. An agency that has no clear process for handling it will resolve the ambiguity in their favour, not yours.
5. Who owns the code when the project ends?
This sounds obvious but it regularly catches businesses out. Confirm in writing:
- You receive the full source code on project completion — not just access to a hosted version.
- You receive all credentials: domain registrar login, hosting account, third-party API keys registered in your name.
- The agency does not retain a licence over any proprietary code they wrote specifically for you.
If the vendor hosts your site on their own infrastructure and controls all the credentials, you are dependent on them indefinitely. Moving away becomes difficult and expensive. Good agencies are transparent about this from day one because they know the relationship has to work both ways.
A Note on Price
Cheapest is almost never best. But most expensive is not safest either. The right question is not “how low can we get the price?” but “what does this price actually include, and what will it cost me when things go wrong?”
A realistic budget for a professional small business website in India is ₹80,000–₹3,00,000 depending on complexity. Below that range, you are either getting a template with minimal customisation or you are taking a risk on an inexperienced team. Above that range, you should be getting a genuinely custom product with strong process and clear accountability.
What QrComTech Does
We are a Bengaluru-based development team with 14+ years of experience building web and mobile products for businesses in India and internationally. We share code repositories with clients, document every project in plain language, and handle post-launch support transparently.
If you are evaluating vendors for a web project, get in touch or review our web development services. We are happy to answer all five of these questions — and any others you have — before you make a decision.