A number produced without questions is a bad sign. An experienced provider responds with a list of questions: about who owns the data and what happens on failure. A supplier that commits to a figure before understanding the scope is guessing, and vue vs livewire a guess resurfaces as a change order — on your budget.
Be wary of any distance between the engineers on the sales call and the people who will code. Insist on specific people rather than roles in the agreement, with a provision that requires notice before anyone is swapped. A vendor that will only describe a pool of resources and never names individuals is preserving the right to assign anyone it likes.
Require access to the repository from day one. A provider that shows code only at milestones is inviting you to trust a black box. Regular commits and pull requests show you how many people are really working far better than any status report. This extends to the automated test suite: if there is no pipeline, assurances about quality are just talk.
Vague wording in the contract around code ownership is never an oversight. The contract needs to state plainly that all deliverables transfer to your business on payment. Also check the jurisdiction and the payment schedule: a request for most of the money up front with nothing due in return for weeks removes the only leverage you have.
Finally, retail software development pay attention to how they communicate. Confirm what overlap there will be with your working day, which is better laravel or .net person handles day-to-day questions and on what response times. Some genuine overlap generally works; zero overlap converts each small question into a lost day. Careless writing in the early emails rarely improves once the work starts.