Bad proposals rarely look bad. They look professional, arrive quickly, and cost less than the alternatives. The risk is not hidden in what they say — it is hidden in what they leave undefined, because undefined terms are decided later by whoever holds the leverage.

Here are nine lines worth stopping on, and the question that resolves each one.

1. "Development of the platform as discussed"

There is no scope here, only a memory of a meeting. Every disagreement for the next six months will be resolved by whoever recalls the conversation more confidently.

Ask: can you list the specific user roles and the actions each role can perform?

2. "Ownership transfers upon final payment"

Reasonable-sounding, and structurally dangerous. It means any dispute over the last invoice puts your entire product in limbo — which is precisely when a dispute is most likely.

Ask: can assignment happen per invoice, so paid work is owned as we go?

3. "Hosting and infrastructure managed by us"

Often offered as convenience. It means your production database, DNS and deployment access live in an account you do not control. Leaving becomes a negotiation rather than a decision.

Ask: can all infrastructure be provisioned in our accounts, with your team granted access?

4. "Testing included"

Manual testing by the person who wrote the feature is testing in the sense that reading your own essay is proofreading.

Ask: what proportion of the estimate is automated testing, and what specifically is covered?

5. "Team of experienced developers"

No names, no seniority, no commitment. You may be sold by principals and delivered by juniors — a substitution that is invisible until velocity tells you.

Ask: who specifically works on this, and what notice do we get before anyone is replaced?

6. "Estimated timeline: 12 weeks"

Twelve weeks from what, assuming what? Timelines without dependencies are wishes. When it slips, the delay will be attributed to your feedback speed — sometimes fairly.

Ask: what are you assuming about our response times, content delivery and third-party access?

7. "Post-launch support available at our standard rates"

Available is not committed. On day three after launch, "available" can mean next month.

Ask: what is the guaranteed response time for a production outage, and what happens if it is missed?

8. "We will use our proprietary framework"

This is the strongest form of lock-in that exists. Even with full source ownership, no other team can maintain it, and every future quote you receive will include the cost of leaving.

Ask: is every component of the stack open-source or a standard commercial product we can license directly?

9. "50% upfront, 50% on delivery"

On a six-month project this means one checkpoint, at the end, when all leverage has already been spent.

Ask: can we structure payments against milestones with written acceptance criteria?

What a good proposal does instead

• States what is explicitly out of scope, in a list, without being asked.
• Names the people and their time allocation.
• Separates discovery from delivery, and prices them separately.
• Includes a projection of third-party running costs.
• Describes what happens when the engagement ends, before it begins.

The most expensive words in any proposal are the ones both parties assumed they understood the same way.

If you are holding two or three proposals right now, send us the terms — not the pricing, the terms. We will tell you where the risk sits in each, including in ours.