The red flags to check before you pay a freelance developer: portfolio links that do not open, vague answers about their own work, no written scope, a demand for full payment up front, code and accounts held in their name rather than yours, and an invoice name that does not match the person you hired. Each one takes about a minute to check.
That moment is where most bad experiences become unavoidable. The work looks right, the conversation was good, and they have asked for a deposit to start. Five minutes of checking now is worth more than any amount of care later.
None of the items below are about catching a scammer. Outright fraud is rare. What is common is a mismatch nobody noticed until money had moved.
1. The work opens, and it is theirs
Click every link. If a portfolio piece is dead, ask why. Sites do get taken down, and a straight answer is fine. If several are dead, or all of them are preview links with no permanent home, that is a pattern.
For anything that looks like a team product, ask what part they did. "I built the whole thing" about something with a twelve-person credits page is worth a follow-up question.
2. They can answer a specific question about their own work
Pick one thing from their portfolio and ask about a decision inside it. Why that database. What broke at launch. What they would do differently.
Someone who built it answers immediately and usually with a complaint. Someone who did not gets vague and general. You do not need to be technical to hear the difference.
3. The scope is written down somewhere
Not a contract necessarily. A message you both agreed to is fine. It needs to contain what is being delivered, roughly when, for how much, and what is explicitly not included.
The "not included" line prevents most disputes. Two sentences: "Includes the checkout flow and the receipt email. Does not include the admin dashboard or App Store submission."
4. Payment is staged, not all up front
For a first job with someone new, a deposit plus a balance on delivery is normal. Full payment up front is not, unless the job is very small.
Equally: refusing any deposit is not a virtue on your side. Nobody should be financing your project for free, and asking them to is a good way to end up last in their queue.
5. Accounts are in your name
Repo, hosting, domain, database, third-party services. Create them in your accounts, then invite the developer. If accounts already exist in theirs, agree in writing how and when they transfer.
This is the single most common thing that goes wrong, and it almost never goes wrong on purpose. It goes wrong because someone spun up a Vercel project on a personal account at 2am and nobody thought about it again until a year later, after they stopped replying to email.
6. You know how you will get the code
Ask directly: "Where will the code live, and how do I get it if you disappear?" The answer should be immediate and boring. Anyone building something for you should be pushing to a repository you can see, from day one, not delivering a zip at the end.
7. You have agreed what happens if it slips
Software is late. This is not a character flaw. What matters is whether you find out early.
Agree on a weekly check-in and a rule: if a date is going to move, you hear about it as soon as they know, not on the day. Someone who tells you in week two that week five is at risk is doing the job well.
8. The invoice matches the person
Name on the invoice, name on the profile, name on the bank details. If money is going somewhere with a different name, ask why before you send it. There are legitimate reasons (an agency, a company entity, a payment provider) and they are all easy to explain.
What this list is not
It is not a substitute for judgement, and it does not make a hire safe. It makes a hire checkable, which is the most any process can do.
Shipfolks does not do these checks for you. We are a directory: profiles are reviewed for being real listings, not vetted for skill, and we are not part of the money. It moves directly between you and the person you hired, with no fee to us. That is why contact here costs nothing, and it is also why the eight minutes above are yours to spend.
Ready to start? The builders currently open to work are here.