Most founders we work with are not engineers, and the thing they worry about most is not the price u2014 it is being unable to tell whether the money is being spent well until it is too late to react. That is a reasonable fear, and it is solvable without learning to read code.
Working software, every week
The single most reliable signal. Not screenshots, not a status percentage u2014 something you can click. If weeks pass with progress described only in words, that is worth asking about immediately.
Plain language, on request
You should be able to ask why something was built a particular way and get an answer you understand. A team that cannot explain its decisions without jargon either does not have a clear reason or is not thinking about you as the audience. Both are problems.
Bad news arriving early
Every project hits surprises. The question is when you hear about them. A team that tells you in week three that an assumption broke is doing its job. A team where everything is fine until it suddenly is not has been managing you rather than the project.
Access to your own assets
The code lives in a repository you own, from day one.
Hosting and infrastructure accounts are in your name.
You have the designs, and the documentation of how things work.
If handing the project to a different team would be a crisis, you do not have a product yet u2014 you have a dependency.
Those four signals cost you nothing to ask for and tell you almost everything. Any partner worth working with will be glad you asked.
