12 questions to ask a software development company in India

Choosing a software development company is mostly a matter of asking the right questions before signing rather than after. The twelve below cover scope, price, ownership, hosting, data, support and failure, and each one has an answer that should worry you. They come from the questions our own customers ask us, and from the projects we have taken over from vendors who were never asked. Ask them in writing and keep the answers with the contract.

Questions about scope and price

1. How will you write the scope, and will I see the screen list and data model before you quote? The worrying answer: a proposal with a price and a page of bullet points. A price without a scope is a guess.
2. Is the price fixed, and what happens when I change my mind? The worrying answer: 'we will adjust'. The good answer: changes are written, priced and approved, and nothing is absorbed quietly. See fixed price versus time and material.
3. What is not included? The worrying answer: silence. Migration, training, hosting, third-party charges such as SMS and WhatsApp messages, and store fees should each be named as in or out.
4. How will I see progress? The worrying answer: weekly status reports. The good answer: a working build you can log into, every week, from the first month.

Questions about ownership and code

1. Who owns the code and the accounts? The worrying answer: anyone other than you. The source code, the domain, the hosting account, the Meta business account for WhatsApp, the app store accounts and the payment gateway account should all be in your company's name, with the vendor as an operator.
2. Can I take the code elsewhere? The good answer: yes, with a documented deployment and a handover fee if any. If leaving means starting again, you are renting, not buying.
3. What is built on frameworks and what is custom? Vendors who reuse their own platform can be faster and cheaper, which is good, as long as you know which parts are yours and which are licensed.

Questions about hosting, data and compliance

1. Where will the software run and where is the data stored? The answer should be a named cloud provider and a region in India, not 'the cloud'. Ask who has access to the servers and how that access is logged.
2. What is the backup schedule and when was a restore last tested? The worrying answer: 'daily backups' with no mention of ever restoring one. A backup that has not been restored is a hope.
3. How do you handle personal data and the compliance my business needs? For anyone holding customer, patient or employee data, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act applies. Healthcare adds ABDM; invoicing above the threshold adds GST e-invoicing; messaging adds Meta's WhatsApp rules. Ask what they have done before, not what they have read.

Questions about support and failure

1. Who do I call at nine at night, and what happens next? The good answer is a named person, a response time in writing, and a description of what monitoring catches before you call. The worrying answer is a ticket portal and a promise.
2. What happens if you shut down or we part ways? The good answer covers code handover or escrow, data export in a documented format, and a notice period. Ask for it in the contract, not in conversation.

How to weigh the answers

No vendor answers all twelve perfectly, and a small company that says 'we have not done that, here is how we would' is often a better bet than a large one with a rehearsed yes. What you are listening for is specificity. A vendor who has built a GST connector describes the Invoice Registration Portal. A vendor who has run a hospital system describes what a backup restore looks like at 3 am. A vendor who has never done either speaks in adjectives.

What we answer, for the record

We would rather be asked these than not. Our services page describes how we scope, price and run projects: a week of discovery, a fixed scope and price, weekly working builds, and a named person after go-live. The proof points are on the product pages. Healthixio has cleared ABDM milestones 1 to 3, Pathixio runs bidirectional analyser interfaces, and everything we host is backed up and monitored by us. If you want to put the twelve questions to us, get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

Should I pick the cheapest quote?

Only if the scopes are the same, and they rarely are. A cheaper quote usually has a thinner scope, an excluded migration, or a hosting bill that appears later. Put the quotes side by side on the same screen list and the same inclusions before comparing numbers. The cheapest total over three years is usually not the cheapest first invoice.

Does the company need to be in my city?

Not for most projects. Discovery and go-live benefit from a site visit, and a good vendor will make them. The rest is delivered remotely with weekly builds and calls. What matters more than distance is whether the team has built for your kind of business before and whether a named person answers when something breaks.

How many references should I ask for?

Two is enough if you ask the right thing. Do not ask whether the vendor was good. Ask what went wrong on the project and how the vendor handled it, and ask what happened the first time something broke after go-live. A reference who cannot name a single problem has either had an unusual project or has not been asked before.