Seven questions to ask before hiring any developer

Hiring someone to build software is hard precisely when you cannot evaluate the work yourself. You can still evaluate the answers to these. Ask them of me too.

1. Who owns the code?

The answer should be you, in writing, in a repository you have an account on from day one. If the code lives somewhere you cannot see and you would lose it by leaving, you are renting your own product.

2. What happens if you disappear?

Everyone gets ill and everyone eventually moves on. Ask what another developer would need to pick this up. "The code is documented and the deployment is scripted" is a real answer. "That won't happen" is not.

3. What is not included in this price?

If the answer is "nothing, it's all covered", they have not thought about it. Cloud hosting, domains, app-store fees, payment-gateway commission and message costs are always paid by someone. Find out now, not in month three.

4. What would you cut if the budget were half?

This is the best question on the list. Someone who has actually shipped things will answer immediately and specifically, because they have made this trade before. Someone who has not will say it all matters.

5. How will I see progress?

You should be looking at something that runs, weekly, from the second or third week. Not screenshots and not a percentage. A long silence followed by a big reveal is where projects go to fail.

6. What have you got wrong before?

Anyone with a decade of experience has broken production, under-estimated a project or shipped a bug that cost someone money. A candid, specific answer tells you they learned something. A blank one tells you they either have not done much or will not tell you when it happens on yours.

7. Who exactly writes the code?

Worth asking plainly in 2026. Some of it will be AI-assisted at almost any studio — that is fine and it makes things faster. What you want to know is whether a human reads all of it before it goes live, and whether that human will still be reachable when something breaks.

My own answer to all seven is on this site. If any of it stops being true, it should stop being written here.

One more, for free

Ask whether they will tell you not to build something. A developer whose advice is always "yes, and it'll cost this much" is a supplier. One who occasionally says "you don't need that yet" is worth considerably more than they charge.