10 Things to Require in Any Software Contract
Before you sign with any dev shop — us included — ask them to put these ten commitments in writing. The ones who squirm are telling you something.
Group 1 — Commercial Terms
Get the money and ownership questions answered before a line of code exists.
Fixed price & a defined finish line
No open-ended hourly meter. Scope, price, and launch milestones locked in writing before building begins — and a stated definition of "done" you both agree on.
100% IP & repository ownership, from day one
All code, repositories, credentials, and assets belong entirely to you — pushed to your GitHub organization as the work happens, not handed over at the end. Zero hostage dependencies.
Same-day collaboration
A senior team working US business hours, with your questions answered the day you ask them — not a reply cycle measured in overnight lags.
Group 2 — Engineering Quality
The commitments that determine whether your app survives year two. Your technical advisor should verify these; here's what each one means for you.
Zero-warning static analysis policy
Automated linters run on every code change, and the main branch stays at zero warnings. In plain terms: no "we'll clean it up later." Later never comes.
No direct commits to main
Every change goes through a pull request with passing automated CI checks and senior peer review. No single developer — theirs or yours — can slip untested code into your product.
Zero hardcoded secrets or keys
Pre-commit secret scanners keep API keys, database passwords, and tokens out of source control entirely — so a code leak is never a credentials leak.
Performance budgets, in writing
Don't accept a speed promise from a website — require your app's frame-rate and API latency targets defined per project in the contract, with measurement conditions specified, and verified automatically before each milestone bills.
Automated test coverage on the code that matters
Core business logic, calculations, auth handlers, and data converters covered by automated tests before release. The code that touches your money gets tested before it ships.
Group 3 — Delivery
Launching is part of the job, not an epilogue.
App store submission, handled end to end
Provisioning, review-guideline compliance, and every resubmission until your app is approved — you never deal with Apple or Google alone. (No one can guarantee Apple's decision; require a vendor who owns the process until it's done.)
Documented handoff
Setup scripts, README instructions, and documentation complete enough that any competent team could take over tomorrow. If the docs only make sense to the people who wrote them, you don't own your product — they do.
Take this list to any dev shop.
Or hire the one that wrote it.
Every point on this list is written into Pitch 15's client contracts — you can read the exact language in our sample contract exhibit, or see how we enforce the engineering points in Our Engineering Standard.