India has more software development agencies in 2026 than it has districts, and most of their pitch decks look identical from the outside. “End-to-end delivery,” “agile process,” “dedicated team,” “5-star rating on Clutch.” None of that helps you tell a good build partner from a body-shop with a slick website.
What helps is asking six questions on the discovery call. If the answers to any one of them feel evasive, end the call and move to the next vendor on your shortlist. We’ve sat on the wrong side of these conversations enough times to know what the dodges sound like.
1. “Who actually writes the code? And do they meet me?”
A surprising number of Indian agencies sell on the strength of their lead partner’s LinkedIn, then hand the build to a sub-contractor pool you never meet. The work that ships under the agency’s logo was written by people whose names don’t appear on the contract.
What you want to hear: the names of the actual engineers, with their LinkedIn profiles, and an offer to put them on the discovery call. A good agency lets you talk to the people who will touch your codebase before you sign anything.
Red flag: “Our team will be assigned post-signing.” Translation: nobody in particular is doing this work yet.
2. “What do I own on day one? On day 90? On the day we part ways?”
Lock-in is the single biggest hidden cost in an agency relationship. It doesn’t show up in the proposal because the agency makes it sound like “managed hosting” or “ongoing maintenance.” What it actually means is the vendor controls your codebase, your domain, your cloud bill and your DNS — and leaving costs you a six-week migration project.
What you want to hear, in writing:
- Code is pushed to your GitHub / GitLab organisation from commit #1.
- The domain is in your registrar. The agency gets delegated DNS access, nothing more.
- Cloud bills (Vercel, AWS, GCP, Cloudflare) are on your account. The agency is a collaborator, not the account holder.
- Documentation — architecture, runbook, env reference, on-call playbook — is handed off at every milestone.
- Offboarding is a defined one-week handover, not a renegotiation.
Red flag: any answer that starts with “we’ll figure that out later” or “don’t worry about it.”
3. “Is the price fixed before discovery ends, or after?”
“Fixed price” is one of the most misused terms in Indian software contracting. Some agencies use it to mean “we’ll write a proposal and you’ll pay that number, but every change you ask for after signing is a new proposal.” That’s not fixed price — that’s a change-order trap.
What you want to hear: the price is fixed before discovery ends. Pivots inside the original budget are absorbed by the agency, not change-ordered to you. If the agency under-quotes because of their own miscalculation, they eat the difference. That clause should be in writing in the MSA.
Red flag: hourly billing dressed up as fixed price. If you see “estimated hours: 400 @ ₹2,500/hr” in the proposal, you’re paying hourly — you just don’t know it yet.
4. “What happens on day 500?”
Most agency relationships end at launch. The product ships, the team scatters, and 18 months later when you need a feature added or a bug fixed, you’re hiring a fresh shop to reverse-engineer code they didn’t write.
What you want to hear: the same team that designs your product is the team that maintains it. Support after launch is an optional retainer at a published hourly rate — not a quote-per-ticket black box where every email costs you an unknown number.
Red flag: “After launch you’ll be handed off to our support desk.” That support desk is staffed by people who’ve never seen your code.
5. “Show me your own production stack.”
Most agencies don’t run anything they’ve sold you. Their own marketing site has no error tracking, no uptime monitoring, no CI gate — because that stuff costs money and they don’t feel it when their own site goes down at 2am.
What you want to hear: Sentry / Datadog / equivalent for errors, a real uptime monitor (Better Stack, Pingdom, etc.), type-checked CI gates blocking bad deploys, automated database backups. If the agency doesn’t run this stuff on their own site, they won’t install it on yours.
Red flag: “That’s an additional service we offer.” Production-grade observability is not an upsell — it’s the default any shipping team uses.
6. “What won’t you take on?”
The most honest answer an agency can give is “we don’t do that.” Agencies that take every brief end up faking depth in two thirds of the work. Embedded firmware, SOC 2 audit certification, hyper-specialised SEO data-science — if a generalist agency claims expertise here, ask them to show you a shipped example. They won’t have one.
What you want to hear: a short, specific list of things they don’t take — and the name of a specialist firm they’d refer you to for each.
Red flag: “We can do anything.”
The shortlist after these six questions
Run this checklist on every agency you’re evaluating. You’ll find that most of them flunk on at least two questions, and the remaining few are the ones worth a second conversation. The point isn’t to catch anyone out — it’s to surface the misalignments that would otherwise eat your project in month four.
If an agency dodges these six, they’ll dodge harder questions later. Save yourself the relationship.
How we answer them
For full disclosure — Infocomiva answers all six in writing. Code in your GitHub from commit #1. Fixed price in the scope doc, pivots absorbed, under-quote clause in the MSA. Same team after launch. Production-grade Sentry/uptime/CI on day one. A published list of what we don’t take on. And on the “who writes the code” question, our senior leads sit on every discovery call before you sign anything.
If you’re shortlisting and want to compare us against the others on this checklist, book a discovery call — we’ll come back inside 24 hours with a custom prototype, not a deck.
Published 4 Jun 2026 by the Infocomiva engineering team · Read more on the Infocomiva blog.