Should we get several quotes?

Yes, but not to find the lowest price. Get them to see how differently the project is understood. Quotes that sit far apart almost always rest on different assumptions. The revealing move is to ask which assumptions each one made. Anyone who can name them has thought about it; anyone who dodges has guessed.

How important are references from our own industry?

Less important than people assume. What counts for more is whether comparable technical requirements have been solved before: several languages, several domains, interfaces, finely graded permissions. An agency that has built twenty sites in your industry but never a connection to a merchandise management system is of little help with exactly that requirement.

Choosing a TYPO3 Agency: Questions That Bring Clarity

Anyone looking for a TYPO3 agency usually ends up comparing quotes that are hard to compare. More useful than the price comparison are a few questions whose answers say a lot about what working together will be like.

Price is the worst yardstick

Quotes for the same project can sit far apart without either being dubious. The cause is differing assumptions: how many custom content elements are meant? Who writes the copy? Is migrating the existing content included? Is the old material cleared up or carried over?

So before comparing figures, it is worth comparing assumptions. The difference frequently dissolves in the process.

Questions that tell you something

What happens after go-live? Anyone with a concrete answer has thought about running the site. Anyone who dodges is planning as far as sign-off.

How do you handle updates? The answer shows whether the TYPO3 lifecycle features in their thinking or whether updates are treated as an interruption.

What happens if we end the arrangement? An uncomfortable question with a high yield. Does the code sit in a repository we have access to? Is the deployment process documented? Can we hand the installation to somebody else?

Where does the configuration live? If essential settings sit in the database rather than in versioned files, the installation is hard to hand over and hard to follow.

What would you advise us against? Anyone who agrees with everything either was not listening or will raise no objections during the project. Neither is good.

Answers that should give you pause

A fixed price for a project whose scope has not been settled. Either the margin is generous or change requests are coming.

A promise to adapt a standard theme when the requirements on the table are clearly custom. That gets expensive at the first departure from it.

Strikingly short schedules on projects whose content does not exist yet. The bottleneck is almost never the development.

Vague statements about accessibility. Since the BFSG that is no longer optional for many sites; an agency should have a clear position on it.

How to spot a good quote

It names its assumptions. It separates one-off effort from running costs. It works with ranges where there is uncertainty, rather than feigning precision. It says what is not included.

And it contains at least one place where something different is proposed from what was asked for. That is a sign somebody thought about the enquiry rather than processing it.

Size is not a criterion in itself

Large agencies bring capacity and cover arrangements; in return you rarely work with the same people from beginning to end.

Small teams offer short routes and continuity; in return capacity is limited and holiday periods are more noticeable.

Both work. What matters is that the expectation matches reality: if you want short routes, do not pick the largest agency, and if you need resilience, do not pick the smallest.

What memberships and certificates say

Around TYPO3 you meet two kinds of badge: memberships of the TYPO3 Association, and personal certifications for development, integration or editing. Both appear on a great many agency sites, and both are regularly overvalued.

A membership is a form of funding. The fee goes into the development, the security work and the infrastructure of the system. It says something about a company’s relationship with the project and nothing about the quality of a particular piece of work. Anyone selling it to you as a qualification is selling you a donation as an examination.

A certification is an exam passed by one individual at one point in time. That is more than a membership says, and still no substitute for looking at code and working practices. When in doubt, ask who on the team is certified and whether that person will work on your project.

Both are an indication, not proof. The most dependable pointer stays the same: ask to be shown an existing installation and ask who worked on it.

For the record, so it does not go unsaid: aceArt GmbH is a Silver Member of the TYPO3 Association, and the badge appears on these pages. It means exactly what is written here. It replaces none of the questions in this guide.

If you are not awarding new work but replacing an existing provider, the handover side of this question is covered under changing agency.

Choosing a TYPO3 Agency: What Actually Matters