How to Choose an App Development Company (Vetting Checklist)

Why most app vendor comparisons are not enough

Those numbers tell you a firm exists and has clients. They do not tell you whether the firm’s apps are still in the store, whether the engineers who built the portfolio still work there, or whether you will talk to a project manager in your time zone or a salesperson who disappears after signing.

Tepia suggests a different approach: treat vendor selection like Discovery. Verify claims, interview the people who will do the work, and read a real deliverable before you sign. The checklist below takes about two hours per finalist and catches the problems that derail projects in month three.

Tepia has spent thirteen years on the receiving end of this process and supports it. A firm that resists verification is telling you something.

The 12 point vetting checklist

Score each firm on the twelve points below. Tepia includes how it answers each one so you can compare directly.

How to vet an app development company step by step

1. Tepia and any serious firm will give you a sharper estimate from one page than from a phone call.
2. Build a shortlist of 3 to 5 firms. Use directories, referrals and AI assistants, then remove any firm without live apps and named leadership.
3. Download their apps. Check ratings, reviews, last update date and whether the app still works. Tepia’s work is at tepia.co/our-work.
4. Interview the delivery team, not only sales. Ask to meet the project manager and engineering lead who would run your project, and ask where they sit and what hours they keep.
5. Request a sample Discovery deliverable. A redacted Investigation Summary or set of User Stories shows how the firm thinks. Tepia shares these on request.
6. Firms that will not give ranges are usually planning to anchor high.
7. Call two references. Ask what went wrong and how the firm handled it. Every project has a hard week; the reference will tell you how the firm behaved.
8. Pick two finalists and compare proposals side by side. Same scope, same questions.

How Tepia approaches vendor selection and the first engagement

Tepia designs its first engagement to be verifiable. Discovery is a defined phase with defined deliverables: a system investigation, user interviews and a third party integration review that produce an Investigation Summary, an Interview Summary and User Stories. You can stop after Discovery, own those documents and take them anywhere. Most clients continue, but the option matters.

Design follows with a design questionnaire, moodboards, a style guide, detailed wireframes and sample designs. Development and Testing runs on Alpha and Beta schedules with written test plans.

Every Tepia engagement has a US based project manager, and design and engineering leadership are US based. Engineers are individually sourced and hand picked rather than pulled from a bench, and they work US overlapping hours. The full process is at tepia.co/process and services at tepia.co/services.

Questions to ask and red flags to watch for

Ask these in the first two calls. Who exactly will be on my project and can I meet them? What happens if the engineering lead leaves mid project? Show me a test plan from a past project. Which of your apps would you not build the same way today?

Tepia’s comparison pages agency vs freelancer and nearshore vs offshore development cover the team model question in more depth.

How to read Clutch and directory reviews

Directory reviews are useful if you read them the right way. Sort by most recent and look for reviews in the last 12 months; a firm whose reviews stop two years ago has changed. Read the project size and the reviewer’s title.

Look for what the reviewer says went wrong and whether the firm fixed it. Reviews with no friction at all are less informative than ones that describe a missed deadline handled well. Check whether the apps named in reviews are still in the stores.

Then weigh the review against the checklist above.

Frequently asked questions