Being a near-shore outsourcing company and based in a relatively low-cost country, we as SWExperts, underline our cost-wise competitive advantage in our website and in correspondences with our potential clients.

Nevertheless, we also bring to the attention of our potential clients, and here in our blog post to the visitors of our website, that the most common mistake in deciding software development partner is making a decision based on price only.

This mistake is so often done, that its occurrence is more than all the other mistakes combined. Moreover, experience shows that sometimes, this same mistake is done by the same person or party more than once!

There are many reasons leading this mistake to be the most popular one, and these shall be regarded as pitfalls to be avoided in order not to make a decision based on price only. These include;

• Quality, especially at the beginning of a project, is not tangible but a price offer is.
• For companies in which procurement is handled by a separate department, choosing the cheapest offer is something justifiable to the internal stakeholders in case something goes wrong.
• Decision makers believe that most of the software developers are the same and that the cost shall be the sole deciding factor.
• Enough number of quotations are not collected from the same and different scale software development companies to evaluate which offer is over-priced which is not.

On top of the above not all-comprehensive list, more often than none, software development companies follow the unethical practice of providing underpriced quotations just to have the job awarded to them, and a most probably after receiving some advance payment from the clients and getting involved into the code development an extent after which it would be easy for the client to switch to another company, they start implying that they made a mistake at the beginning of the project with budgeting, slow down the project, and tell that they can’t continue under these circumstances if the price is not increased.

For all of these reasons, we as SWExperts always encourage our potential clients to get into contact with as many outsourcing companies as needed for them to be comfortable with the number of price offers on hand, to challenge each price offer in terms of total man-days assumed, average salary of the software developers, risk factors etc., and make a decision not based on price only.