What to ask a web agency before you sign anything
By the time you sign, you have already spent most of your bargaining power. Everything you wanted to negotiate gets negotiated before the deposit clears, because after that the relationship runs on goodwill, and goodwill is not a contract term.
The questions to ask a web agency are not really about design. Design is the part you can see, and you will form a fair view of it from a portfolio in about four minutes. What you cannot see is ownership, access, who is actually at the keyboard, and what happens when the project ends. Those are the parts that cost money later, usually two years later, usually at the worst possible moment.
Here is the list we would want a client to bring to us. We have answered each one for Creatif Work underneath, because a set of questions the author will not answer about themselves is just marketing with a checklist layout.
Who is named as the domain registrant, and who holds the logins?
These are three separate assets and they get confused constantly: the domain, the hosting, and the files.
The domain is the one that ruins weeks. Plenty of agencies register a client’s domain inside their own registrar account because it is faster at the time, and most of them hand it back without drama. The risk is not malice, it is a business that has moved on, changed staff, or closed. Your domain also carries your email, so a domain you cannot control is a mailbox you cannot control.
Ask three things. Whose company name appears on the registrant record. Which registrar account it sits in and who can log in. Whether you will be given the authorisation code on request without a discussion. It is worth knowing that ICANN’s transfer policy imposes a 60 day inter-registrar transfer lock after a change of registrant, and another after a transfer, so a domain dispute has a built-in delay before you can act at all.
Then the files. Design source files, the page layouts, and the licences. Licences are the quiet one. If premium plugins, a theme, or a webfont sit under the agency’s pooled developer account rather than yours, your site stops receiving updates the day the relationship ends, and nobody tells you. Ask for the licence list and whose name each one is under.
Our answer. Domains are registered in the client’s name and the registrar cost is passed through at cost. Logins, files and licence details are handed over at launch, not held back as a bargaining chip. Hosting is offered from S$200 a year because it is genuinely easier for most clients, and it is optional. The site is portable either way.
What happens the day we decide to leave?
This is the single most useful question on the list, and the reaction to it tells you more than the answer does.
You are not asking because you plan to leave. You are asking because the exit path is where lock-in hides. What you want is a plain list of what you receive: a full database and file export, DNS control, an administrator account that is genuinely administrator, the plugin and licence inventory, and a site that does not depend on the agency’s own hosting or licence keys to keep functioning.
The patterns to watch for are a proprietary CMS with no export path, a private theme framework the agency licenses to you rather than gives you, and a build so tied to one host that moving it is a rebuild. Some are reasonable trade-offs, provided you know about them in advance and priced them in. None of them are reasonable as a surprise.
A weak answer sounds like “we take care of all of that for you”. A strong answer is a list, and it should be attached to the proposal.
Our answer. Builds are WordPress with Elementor by default, on GPL licensed software that nobody can take back from you. Export is standard. Hosting is optional and the site moves without our involvement. Maintenance runs on six or twelve month terms rather than an open-ended contract, because a plan that only survives by being hard to cancel is not a plan.
Can our own staff edit the site, or only you?
Every agency says yes. Ask for a demonstration instead.
Pick a real task, the kind your team will do monthly. Updating a product specification. Adding a PDF datasheet. Swapping a photo on a project page. Adding a new team member. Then watch someone perform it live, and time it. This takes ten minutes in a pitch meeting and it is the most informative ten minutes you will spend.
What you are looking for is whether the page is genuinely editable or only visually editable. Text baked into an image cannot be updated by your coordinator, and it cannot be read by Google either. A page assembled as one flattened block will break the moment someone touches it. A page builder licence held by the agency means your team can edit until renewal day. A headless build with no one on your side able to deploy is a beautiful site with a permanent gatekeeper.
Also ask who can create a new page, not just edit an old one. Most lock-in is not in editing. It is in adding.
Our answer. WordPress with Elementor unless the brief calls for something else. You get an administrator account and the logins. Updating a specification or attaching a datasheet is a client-side job, and if it is not, we built the page wrong. Structure is wireframed and signed off before design precisely so that the page has a shape your team can add to later.
Who is actually doing the work?
The people in the pitch are not always the people on the project. This is not a moral complaint, it is a latency and accountability question. Ask for names. Who writes the copy. Who builds it. Who you email at six in the evening when a form stops sending.
Ask whether any part is subcontracted, and whether that is disclosed in the contract. Subcontracting is fine when it is declared and the accountable party is still one person you can reach. It is not fine when a brief has to travel through three people before it reaches anyone who can act on it, which is how a two-day fix becomes a fortnight.
For technical B2B work there is a second version of this question. Who is going to understand your subject well enough to write about it. Somebody has to sit with your engineer and turn a capability into a sentence a buyer trusts. If nobody in the room can name who that is, the copy will end up being written by you, at night, in a spreadsheet, for free.
Our answer. Creatif Work is a solo studio, founded in 2023, and the person you meet is the person who does the work. That is the advantage and it is also the constraint. A multi-site programme with a hard immovable date and several parallel workstreams is not our best fit, and we would rather say that in the first call than discover it in month three.
What does support cover, exactly, and for how long?
Support is the vaguest word in this industry. It can mean security updates, bug fixes, content edits, new features, hosting, or a phone number that someone answers. Agencies are rarely being evasive here. They just have not written it down.
Get the boundary in writing. Ask which category each of these falls into: a broken contact form, a typo, a new page, a new photo, a new enquiry field, a plugin update, an SSL renewal. Ask how long the included window runs and what the day after looks like. Ask what the response commitment is, and whether it is a commitment or a hope.
Then ask the follow-on that nobody asks: what happens to security updates if we do not take a maintenance plan. Across 54 Singapore B2B sites we reviewed in August 2026, 12 were running an outdated or end-of-life CMS or plugin, and 19 of the 23 sites whose footer we checked still carried an out-of-date copyright year. Almost none of that is neglect by the owner. It is a handover that never defined whose job the updates were.
Our answer. Web projects include 30 days of post-launch support covering bug fixes, minor content edits, image swaps and questions, extended to 45 days on larger builds. New pages, new features and redesigns sit outside it and get quoted. After that, maintenance from S$200 a month covers security and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring and minor layout changes. If you would rather handle updates internally, that is a legitimate choice and we will say so, but it should be a decision rather than a gap.
What a good answer actually sounds like
The pattern across all five is specificity. Anyone can say yes. The test is whether the yes converts into a name, a date, an account, a list, or a clause.
Two practical moves. First, ask for the answers to go into the scope document, not the email thread, because the scope document is what survives a change of staff on either side. Second, ask the awkward one early. An agency that is comfortable discussing its own exit terms in the first meeting is telling you something real about how the last few projects ended.
We publish our bands and terms rather than quoting on request, for the same reason. Web projects start from S$4,000 for a refresh where brand and copy already exist, and what moves the number is how much has to be built from nothing rather than tidied. Our work with THK Engineering, an M&E contractor whose site had to prove it could deliver full packages without subcontracting them out, is a reasonable example of what that looks like when the content is technical and the buyer is not browsing. And if you want the version of this conversation that is only about money, we wrote about what a B2B website actually costs in Singapore separately.
Bring the list. Make us answer it too.