Begin with domain experience, not the number of logos on the website. Ask for three or four projects that sit close to your domain and your stack, and then find out whether those engineers are still with the java web development company. A solid partner will put you on a call with the people who would work on your project. Answers that name nobody at this stage usually mean the delivery team is not the team you were shown.
The contract warrants more scrutiny than the proposal. A few clauses carry most of the weight: ownership of the code, non-disclosure, and exit terms and handover. Everything produced has to transfer to you on payment, together with documentation, pipelines and deployment scripts. Look closely at wording that keeps so-called reusable libraries in the vendor's hands, since it is usually exactly the piece that locks you in.
Ask how they estimate. A credible estimate is accompanied by the assumptions behind it, a task-level breakdown and a range rather than a single number. A fixed-price contract is only reasonable when the requirements are stable and documented; in any other case the supplier prices the risk in and you pay seo for saas company it anyway. Hourly billing shifts that risk to you, so it needs a cap, regular demos and transparent reporting.
How the work is run matters as much as team size. Ask how change requests are handled, who writes the acceptance criteria and how quality assurance works. A well-run team will be able to walk you through a working build every one or two weeks. Written acceptance criteria remain the practical protection against an argument at delivery time.
Finally, think about the end of the engagement while the relationship is still good. Insist that the repository stays in your organisation from day one, and that documentation is written as you go rather than left to the end. A provider confident in its own work says yes immediately; resistance at this point says quite a lot.
