A quote that comes back within a day counts as a warning, not a service level. Any serious team responds with a list of questions: hire edtech developers about who owns the data and what happens on failure. A vendor offshore development rates that prices before understanding the scope is simply working from a template, and that guess resurfaces as a change order — on your budget.
Watch for a mismatch between the team in the pitch and the people who will code. Insist on the names and CVs of the actual team in the statement of work, with wording about substitutions. A vendor that only offers abstract roles and never names individuals is reserving its own flexibility at your cost.
Require access to the repository from the start. A partner that delivers code only at milestones is inviting you to trust a black box. Regular commits and pull requests show you who is really on the project far better than a weekly report. The same applies to the build and deployment setup: if it does not exist, assurances about quality remain nothing more than words.
Loose phrasing around IP is not an accident. The contract must state plainly that all deliverables belong to your business upon settlement of the relevant invoice. Check also the governing law and the milestone terms: a request for most of the money up front with no deliverable attached removes your only leverage.
Lastly, pay attention to the working rhythm. Establish how much working-time overlap the teams will share each day, who is expected to answer your questions and on what response times. A few hours of overlap is usually enough; no overlap turns a five-minute question into a day of delay. Sloppy written English in the early emails does not improve once the work starts.