A quote that comes back within a day should be treated as a bad sign. A competent team responds with a list of questions: angular vs vuejs about who owns the data and what happens on failure. A vendor that quotes before understanding the scope is simply pricing a guess, and that guess resurfaces as a change order — on your budget.
Watch for any distance between the team in the pitch and the developers actually assigned. Insist on specific people rather than roles in the agreement, with wording covering replacement. A provider that talks only about abstract roles and never names specific engineers is reserving the right to assign anyone it likes.
Ask for the source repository from the first week. A team that hands over code only at milestones expects you to trust a black box. Regular commits and pull requests reveal the actual pace far better than any status report. The same holds for the CI pipeline: if there is no pipeline, python software development company promises about quality remain nothing more than words.
Loose contract language around code ownership is not a formality. The document should state plainly that the code, designs and documentation belong to your web application development company on payment. Also check the governing law and how payments are structured: a request for most of the money up front with nothing due in return for weeks eliminates the only leverage you have.
Last, examine communication. Ask what overlap there will be with your working day, which named person handles day-to-day questions and how quickly. Four hours of overlap generally works; none at all turns a five-minute question into a lost day. Unclear written communication in the sales phase rarely improves once the work starts.