So I can give you some insights in my experience in exactly this topic so far: I am working on an app which purpose is to help people in their life (don’t want to go further into detail). I also had a rough idea what I wanted, what competitors offer and where my app would be unique with. As the development in my home country (in europe) would be way to expensive and I am bootstrapping everything with my own money, I approached some different companies abroad at fiver which gave me an estimate of around 5.000-10.000$. The experience was pretty bad. Lack of communication, really generic low quality work. No understanding of the purpose. I pulled back and promised myself to search for more professional companies abroad.

Then I got to clutch.co. I contacted around 15 different companies abroad, explained what I wanted to do, compared different criteria and had two companies at the end which I wanted to choose from. One company gave me a really good gut feeling that they understand my purpose. The other gave me a slightly better price. I went with the better price and the experience was…not so good. Communication was not so good, I had to ask for several things multiple times, quality was okay, but as I recognized that at the beginning, I went to the company with the better gut feeling. It just felt like they are not really behind the idea of the app (in my opinion they should at least let you feel their own excitement for the app and that they believe in it).

I burned around 4000$ just because of going back and forth, but I learned a lot because of it. Now I am working with the company with the better gut feeling. Communication is good BUT do not expect a high extent of creativity. You have to tell them exactly what you want. Therefore there is a huge back and forth in our wireframe round now. The whole development (remember when they said on fiverr it would cost around 5.000$-10.000$?) will cost me around 30.000$ with a React Native app for both stores, branding, backend, Stripe payment option, landing page with registration, SEO conform blog functionality and admin panel.

I am just stating that, so you can learn from my mistake. I lost around half a year because I couldn’t find a good developer abroad and tried to go „cheap“. Now I focus more on what the purpose of the app is and everything follows that within my budget and extended features will follow after the MVP and hopefully some interest in the market.

Hope that helps.