You have a budget, a deadline, and a website or app that needs to exist in three months. You're staring at three proposals and all three sound identical: "vast experience," "modern solutions," "dedicated team." None of them tells you what you actually get.
You make this decision once and pay for it for a year. So don't read the deck — read the signals. Below are the seven that, in our experience, separate a project that ships from one that drags.
1. Do they build in-house or subcontract?
The question that cuts through marketing fastest: who actually writes the code? Plenty of firms in Moldova sell "full service" but only staff the profitable part and farm out the rest to freelancers you never meet. You pay their margin, but the quality belongs to a stranger.
Ask it straight: "Who works on my project, are they your employee, and can I talk to them?" If the answer goes fuzzy, that's your answer.
2. Do they hand over the source code?
If you pay for the build, the code is yours. Sounds obvious, yet plenty of businesses only discover at the breakup that their site lives on the vendor's account, with no repository access and no way to migrate.
Put it in the contract: a Git repository in your name, hosting and domain access, deploy documentation. A fair partner hands these over without blinking. One who wants to keep you captive will invent reasons.
3. Do they have real cases you can visit?
Not screenshots, not "a project for an overseas client under NDA." Live links you open right now. At KERNEX, when someone asks, we point to Pivoteka.md — ten physical locations unified into a single catalog with checkout and delivery, online payment via MAIB; and Datecs.md, the B2B site for the most-used cash register in Moldova, with the official M-Sign e-signature wired in directly from the register's own interface. Open them, test them, call the client if you like.
If a firm can't show anything public after years in business, ask yourself why.
4. Do they understand the whole stack: content, code, launch?
A beautiful site that won't index in Google and never surfaces in ChatGPT or Perplexity answers is an expensive flyer. Today content, code, and distribution are one problem, not three.
Ask how they think about SEO and GEO: do they ship a robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in, an llms.txt, a sitemap, JSON-LD, hreflang for language versions? The kernex.md site runs on Next.js 15 on Cloudflare Workers and ships exactly that set — not because it sounds good, but because otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.
5. Is pricing transparent or "it depends"?
A serious partner tells you what's in the price, what isn't, and what happens if scope grows. You want a quote broken down by stage, not a round number with no breakdown. "We'll tell you as we go" is the classic red flag — it usually means the final invoice will be a surprise.
6. Can they say no?
Counterintuitive, but it's the best sign. A firm that takes any project, in any stack, on any deadline is either lying or subcontracting. A partner who says "we won't do that part well, let us point you to someone who will" is protecting your outcome, not their invoice. We lose projects this way regularly — and it's exactly why the reputation holds.
7. Are they a real legal entity, with a contract?
Last but not skippable: who are you actually signing with? In Moldova every SRL has a 13-digit IDNO issued by the Public Services Agency, public and verifiable in the register. Ask for it, check it. KERNEX operates through KERNEXIT S.R.L., IDNO 1026023040248 — exactly the kind of data our Datero.md platform indexes across 215,000+ Moldovan companies. If your "partner" can't or won't sign a contract under a real company, the problem isn't the price. It's accountability.
The checklist, short version
Before you sign, tick these:
- Their team writes the code, not anonymous subcontractors
- Source code, hosting, and domain stay yours
- At least one public case you can open right now
- They cover the full chain: content, code, SEO/GEO, launch
- Pricing is broken down by stage
- They've said no at least once, with a reason
- You're signing with a company that has a verifiable IDNO
The difference between a partner and five freelancers behind one invoice shows up in exactly these seven points. One gives you a single party accountable for the whole chain. The other gives you chaos with a logo.
Want us to run you through this list? Email hello@kernex.md or call +373 68 508 886 — and ask us the exact questions above.