An estimate that arrives instantly counts as a red flag rather than good service. Any serious team responds with a list of questions: about integrations. A provider that quotes with no clarification is guessing, and a guess resurfaces as a change order — on your budget.
Look out for any distance between the people you meet and those who eventually appear in the repository. Request specific people rather than roles in the agreement, with wording that requires notice before anyone is swapped. A provider that will only describe roles and ongoing software support company will not commit to specific engineers is keeping the right to assign anyone it likes.
Ask for the source repository from the start. A partner that hands over nothing between demos is inviting you to take delivery on faith. Visible commits tell you the actual pace far better than a weekly report. This extends to the automated test suite: if nothing runs automatically, promises about quality remain nothing more than words.
Ambiguous contract language around intellectual property is rarely an oversight. The contract must state in plain terms that all deliverables transfer to your company on payment. Look too at the governing law and how payments are structured: heavy prepayment with no milestone tied to it eliminates the only leverage you have.
Finally, examine how they communicate. Ask how much working-time overlap the teams will share each day, which person is expected to answer your questions and outsource azure development within what time. Some genuine overlap is usually enough; none at all converts a five-minute question into a lost day. Careless writing in the proposal will not improve later.