How to read an agency quote

Agency quotes arrive as a PDF with a logo, a timeline and a number. Founders compare the numbers. The number is the least informative part of the document.

The stories are consistent: $50,000 to $100,000 spent, little to show, scope creep on every request, and the discovery that the work was subcontracted to people the founder never met. None of that is visible in the price. All of it is visible in the answers to eight questions.

1. Who writes the code?

Ask for names. Ask whether they are employees or subcontractors, and whether they will be on the project from start to finish. "Our senior team" is not an answer. If the people on the sales call are not the people on the keyboard, the quality you were shown is not the quality you will get.

2. What do I own, and when?

The contract should say that the code, the designs and every account are yours from the first commit, not on final payment. Ask where the repository lives and whether you have owner access on day one. If the answer involves "handover at the end", the agency holds your product hostage by default.

3. What is not included?

A good quote has a longer exclusions section than inclusions. Testing, deployment, app store submission, analytics, email delivery, admin screens, data migration, bug fixes after launch: each is either in, out, or billed separately. If the quote does not say, it is out.

4. How is a change priced?

Scope creep is not the client's fault; it is the absence of a change process. Ask what happens when you request something new mid-project: who estimates it, how is it approved, and how is it billed. A fixed hourly rate for changes with written approval is fine. "We'll work it out" is not.

5. What happens when the first release breaks?

Every release breaks something. Ask what the warranty period is, what counts as a bug versus a change, and who answers the phone on a Saturday. Thirty days of fixes included is normal. Zero means you will pay to fix their mistakes.

6. How will I see progress?

Weekly demos of working software, on an environment you can open yourself, is the standard. Status reports are not progress. If you cannot click on it, it does not exist yet.

7. What stack, and why?

You do not need to understand the answer. You need to hear one. An agency that chooses a stack because "it is what we use" is fine if what they use is boring and common (Next.js, Postgres, Django, Rails, Supabase). An agency proposing something exotic should explain who else can maintain it when they are gone.

8. How do we end this?

Ask what the termination terms are: notice period, what you receive, and what you pay. A contract you cannot leave is a contract you should not sign.

The lines that are missing

Lay the quote next to this list and mark what is absent. In most proposals you will find no line for testing, no line for deployment, no warranty, no change process and no ownership clause. Each absence is a conversation to have before you sign, not after.

When to get a second opinion

If the quote is more than a month of your runway, have someone who has run engineering teams read it. A Quote Review takes a CTO about an hour and comes back with the eight answers marked up. The cost of the review is a rounding error on the quote; the cost of not reading it is the quote.