Hiring
Questions that reveal how a studio scopes, estimates, documents, and hands over work, with notes on what a good answer sounds like.
Most studio websites look the same from the outside. The differences appear in how a team answers questions about scope, ownership, and the unglamorous work after launch. These twenty questions are designed to surface those differences before money changes hands.
They are not a trick. A good studio will welcome most of them, and a studio that treats a request for a written scope or a code ownership clause as distrust is telling you something useful.
An estimate without a written scope is a number, not a commitment. Ask how the studio turns a conversation into a fixed scope, what happens when the scope changes, and which parts of the estimate are assumptions rather than prices.
Be wary of a quote that is dramatically below every other quote without a written explanation. It usually means a smaller scope, a less experienced team, or an estimate that will grow after the contract is signed.
Ask who will actually do the work. A senior person in the sales meeting is not a guarantee that the same person will write the code. Ask for the roles, the expected involvement, and how the team communicates across time zones.
A studio that works with clients in another country should be able to describe its overlap hours, its written update rhythm, and how decisions are recorded. Weekly demos are more useful than a status report that says everything is on track.
You are paying for an asset, not renting access to one. The contract should state that the custom code and content are yours on final payment, and that third-party components are licensed in a way your business can keep using.
Ask where the code lives, who controls the repository, and what happens if the relationship ends. A studio that hosts everything on its own account without an export path creates a dependency that is difficult to undo.
Security is a process, not a badge. Ask how the studio handles secrets, access, dependencies, and backups. Ask what testing is automated and what is checked by hand. A studio that cannot describe its own practices in plain language is unlikely to document them for you.
For anything that takes payments or holds personal information, ask who is responsible for monitoring, patching, and responding to incidents after launch. The answer should name a person or a process, not a promise to be careful.
The end of a project is where many good builds become difficult. Ask for a written handover: a short architecture note, a deployment guide, a list of accounts and services, and a named support contact. If the studio cannot produce this at the start, ask why.
Finally, ask for a reference you can actually contact, and ask that reference what went wrong as well as what went well. Every project has friction. The useful question is how the studio behaved when it appeared.
Written and maintained by Bitecodes. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
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