How to choose a web development agency that won’t disappear after you sign, and the specific questions to ask before you pay a deposit.
Five questions an agency MUST answer clearly
- Who exactly works on my project? Names and LinkedIn profiles of the senior designers and developers. If the answer is 'we have a team', walk away - it often means your project is handed to juniors while a senior signs the proposal.
- Can I call a reference? Real clients are willing to talk. If they can’t give you a single reference to contact, that’s a question mark.
- What happens if you go out of business? Hosting, domain, code, Figma, database - all of it must be in your name, in your account, from day one. Not 'they’ll hand it over to you'.
- Do I get a written proposal with phases? With fixed deadlines and a price per phase, not one big 'website - €3,500'.
- What does post-launch maintenance include? Who pays for backups, plugin updates, small changes? Spelled out in the proposal, not 'we’ll see later'.
Red flags
- A price without a written proposal: 'we’ll tell you on the call'.
- A portfolio with only screenshots and no links (because the sites no longer exist or have been changed).
- 'We’ll do your SEO in 1 month' - SEO is a 6-12 month process, not one month.
- 'Only we write it, the code is proprietary' - your code must be yours. The standard is MIT or a custom license that you own.
- No plan for the 'site goes down' scenario - backups, monitoring, procedure.
- 'We’ll do your Facebook ads and Google ads and SEO and copywriting' without senior people for each area - most likely nobody goes deep.
Freelancer, small agency or large agency?
Freelancer - the cheapest (€300-1,500), but the risk is instability: illness, a job change, disappearing with your site half-done. Good for very small projects where you’re fine maintaining it yourself afterward.
Small agency (2-15 people) - the sweet spot for SMBs. Senior people do the work directly, prices are realistic (€1,000-10,000 projects), communication is fast. Most serious companies in Serbia fall here.
Large agency (30+ people) - for corporate or enterprise projects with budgets of €20,000 and up. Process quality is higher, but so are prices and response times.
How we do it
We are a small, senior-only agency, a studio in Novi Sad, working from Serbia for clients in Serbia and abroad. Proposals are written with clear phases, the code and Figma files are yours from day one, and maintenance is transparent (see plans). See our work with live links.
Next steps
If you want to compare us with other proposals, send an inquiry with a project description - within one business day you get a written proposal with phases and prices. Free, no obligation.