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Look first at domain experience, not the number of logos on the website. Ask for three or four engagements that resemble your domain and your stack, and then find out who actually wrote that code. A serious vendor is happy to connect you with the people who would work on your project. Vague answers at this stage usually mean you are talking to a reseller.

The paperwork deserves a slower read than the pitch. Three sections matter more than the rest: ownership of the code, the NDA, and igaming backend platform termination and handover. Every artifact has to transfer to you once invoices are settled, along with designs, software development company scripts and infrastructure configuration. Look closely at any clause that leaves reusable components with the vendor, because this is frequently exactly the piece that locks you in.

Find out how the estimate was built. A credible estimate comes with a list of assumptions, a task-level breakdown and a range rather than a single number. A fixed-price contract only makes sense when the requirements are stable and documented; in any other case the supplier prices the risk in and you fund the buffer regardless. Time and materials puts the risk on your side, so it requires a sprint cadence, demos and a budget cap.

How the work is run beats headcount. Find out how a new requirement enters the plan, who defines done and how testing is organised. A well-run team should be able to walk you through a live build at the end of each sprint. Written acceptance criteria are the only reliable protection against endless rounds of rework.

Finally, think about the day you no longer need this vendor at the start rather than at the end. Ask that the source repository lives in your organisation from the beginning, and that documentation is updated as part of the work. A vendor with nothing to hide says yes immediately; resistance at this point says most of what you need to know.