How to choose a web dev company

A web dev company builds for the browser

A web dev company designs, builds, tests and maintains websites and web applications: anything a user reaches through a browser. The label covers a freelancer with a template, a design studio, and an engineering firm running a payments platform.

That range is why the search results look so mixed. Directories, agency homepages and forum threads all answer slightly different questions.

This guide is written for someone choosing a supplier, not someone learning to code. It covers the kinds of supplier, how projects run, when to hire out, how to read a proposal, and what goes wrong.

We have been doing this since 2007 from Mohali, with 500+ projects behind us. Where we have a view that is contested, we say so.

Four kinds of supplier share one label

Most suppliers fall into four types: solo freelancers, design-led agencies, product engineering firms and large systems integrators. They overlap, but each has a centre of gravity, and it shows in what they are good at.

Ask which row they believe they sit in. A supplier that claims to be strongest at everything has probably not turned down a project recently.

Brochure sites and web apps need different suppliers

A brochure site presents information. A web application lets users log in, change data and trigger business logic. The second needs engineering that the first does not, and most disappointing projects begin by confusing them.

A site built on a CMS such as WordPress can be excellent for marketing. It becomes painful when it is stretched into a customer portal with roles, payments and APIs.

A true web app needs authentication, a data model, background jobs, audit trails and a test suite. The React team itself now recommends starting new projects with a framework rather than assembling tooling by hand, which tells you how much plumbing sits under a modern front end.

If your project has user accounts, look for a team with web application development as its core work, not a side line.

The first month decides the next nine

A well-run project starts with discovery, then scope, then design, build, QA, launch and a support period. The first stage is the one buyers most often skip, and it is the one that sets the cost and risk of everything after.

Discovery should end with written artefacts: user roles, the main journeys, a list of integrations, and what is explicitly out of scope. If the supplier skips straight to a quote, they are pricing their guess.

Ask who attends the discovery. If it is a salesperson and a project manager, the engineer who will actually build the thing has not yet read your requirements.

On our side, this is why Moonship exists. Moonship takes a working MVP to production in 30 days, but only because the scope is fixed and written down before the clock starts.

Bring in a partner only where you have gaps

Hire out when you lack a senior engineer, need to ship faster than you can recruit, or want a second opinion before a large commitment. Keep the work in-house when the product is your core differentiator and you already have the people.

Contested territory sits in between. One camp says outsourcing the core product hands away your learning. The other says an experienced external team reaches production sooner, and your staff can take over once the shape is known.

Both are right in different cases. A common compromise is a partner for the first build with your own engineers embedded in review.

If the gap is leadership rather than hands, a fractional arrangement fits better. Our CTO-as-a-Service offering gives you senior engineering direction on a fractional basis, without hiring a full-time executive.

Price follows scope, so ask for scope first

Prices for the same website vary wildly because the scope varies wildly. A supplier who names a figure before they have read your requirements is guessing, and you will pay for the gap later.

We do not publish rates. Work is scoped per project after a discovery call, so any number we printed here would be invented.

What you can compare across proposals is the shape. Check whether it is a fixed scope or a time-and-materials arrangement, which integrations are included, who pays for third-party licences, and what the support period covers.

Two proposals with different totals are often two different projects. Line them up item by item before you compare anything else. The cheaper one may simply exclude testing, which is where the cost reappears.

Ask for live URLs before logos

A client logo proves a relationship existed. A live URL, a named contact and a description of what the supplier personally built proves delivery. Ask for the second.

For each reference, ask three questions: what did you build, what broke, and how was it fixed. A genuine team answers quickly and specifically. A sales team talks about "partnership".

Our own client work includes Paytm, Snapdeal, IKEA, Nestle, Shiprocket and Vikram Solar, and what we did for each is set out on the case studies page.

Do the same check on anyone you shortlist. Open their showcased sites on a mid-range phone over a throttled connection. If the work they are proudest of loads slowly, you have learned something no proposal would tell you.

Make speed a line in the contract

Performance is measurable, so write it down. Google's Core Web Vitals set the public targets: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real users.

INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024, so older proposals that quote FID are using a retired metric.

Put those thresholds in the acceptance criteria and agree how they will be measured, using field data from real visitors rather than a single lab run on the supplier's laptop.

The contested point is how much it matters. Core Web Vitals are a modest ranking signal, and relevance still dominates. But slow pages lose users regardless of what search does, so treat speed as a product requirement and not an SEO favour.

Accessibility carries legal exposure in the US

Accessible design is a delivery obligation, not a courtesy. The benchmark is the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, and level AA is the target most contracts and regulators reference.

In the US, the Department of Justice's web accessibility guidance states that the ADA applies to web content. Its 2024 rule requires state and local government sites to meet WCAG 2.1 AA, and private businesses continue to face demand letters and lawsuits.

Ask a supplier how they test it: automated scans, keyboard-only walkthroughs, screen reader checks. Automated tools catch only a portion of issues, so a team that relies on a single scan is giving you a partial answer.

Put the conformance level in the contract, and have it verified by independent QA testing before launch.

Fixed scope and hourly billing fail differently

Fixed scope gives you certainty over cost and breaks when requirements change. Time-and-materials gives you flexibility and breaks when nobody is watching the burn. Neither is better in general.

Fixed scope suits a defined MVP with a stable list of features. Expect change requests, and agree in advance how they are priced.

Hourly billing suits exploratory work where the answer is not yet known. It needs a weekly demo and a visible burn-down, otherwise you discover the overrun at the invoice.

Many teams blend them: a fixed discovery and first release, then a monthly team on a fractional basis. Whatever you choose, ask what happens if the estimate is wrong. How a supplier answers tells you how they behave under pressure.

Time zones matter less than overlap hours

Distributed delivery works when the overlap is planned, and fails when it is assumed. Two or three shared working hours a day, with a named lead on each side, is enough for most projects.

Our engineering is based in Mohali, in the Chandigarh tricity, with a Canadian office in Markham, Ontario. We serve clients in the US, UK, Canada, India, China and Nigeria, which means we have rehearsed the awkward calls more than once.

The contested question is whether nearshore beats offshore. Nearshore buys easier meetings. Offshore often buys deeper benches of senior engineers. Which matters more depends on how much of your project is conversation and how much is building.

Ask any supplier for their overlap window in writing, and who covers when the lead is on leave.

Failures start before the first line of code

Most failed web projects fail at scoping, not at coding. The usual causes are vague requirements, no single decision-maker on the client side, and integrations discovered halfway through.

The second killer is untested assumptions about legacy systems. A new front end that depends on an old API can inherit that API's limits. If the old system is the real problem, a system modernisation conversation should come before a redesign.

The third is quality assurance left to the end. Testing squeezed into the last two weeks produces a launch date that slips or a launch that ships bugs.

Watch for warning signs in the sales process: a quote with no questions asked, a demo built on a template, and a team that cannot say who your lead engineer will be. Each is cheap to spot now and expensive to discover later.

Own the repository from the first day

You should own the source code, the hosting accounts, the domain and the design files, and the supplier should work inside them. If the code lives in the supplier's repository, you are renting your own product.

Put it in the contract. Intellectual property should pass to you on payment, third-party licences should be listed, and credentials should sit in your organisation's accounts with the supplier added as a collaborator.

Ask to see a deployment runbook before launch. If only one person knows how to release, you have a continuity problem dressed up as a delivery.

This protects both sides. A clean hand-over means you can switch suppliers, bring work in-house, or add a second team without a negotiation. Good suppliers do not mind, because their pitch is the work, not the lock-in.

Pay for a short pilot before a long contract

Before signing a year, buy a small, bounded piece of real work: one feature, one integration, or one audit of your current build. Two to four weeks tells you more than any proposal.

Watch how they communicate when something is unclear, whether the code is reviewable, and whether the demo matches the ticket.

If you already have a site or workflow that is not behaving, our broken workflow assessment is built for this. We look at what is actually happening in your system and tell you where the fault is, before anyone proposes a rebuild.

The right web dev company will be comfortable being tested this way. The wrong one will push you towards a larger commitment first, and that preference is itself the answer you were looking for.