Short answer: the white-label relationships that last are the ones where the agency asked about confidentiality, capacity, ownership and cover before the first client build, and got specific answers in writing. The twelve questions below are the ones we get from the agencies we have worked with longest, in the order they tend to come up.

Confidentiality

1. Will you sign our NDA and a non-solicit? The answer should be an unqualified yes, on your paper. Hesitation here is the red flag that ends the conversation.

2. Will you ever contact our client directly? Only when you invite them, and introduced as part of your team. Ask how they will present themselves on calls and in email.

3. Will our client’s work appear in your portfolio? Not without written consent. Ask to see their portfolio: if it is full of unnamed "a leading agency’s client" case studies, that is the right answer; if you recognise other agencies’ clients by name, be careful.

Capacity and process

4. How much capacity do you have, really? A one-person studio should say so, tell you how many agency partners they keep, and explain what gets them to say no to a date. "We can always fit it in" is a worse answer than "we can start on the 14th."

5. What is your time zone and overlap with ours? You want at least four shared business hours a day. Pacific-to-Eastern works; the other side of the planet needs a plan.

6. How will status updates reach us? The right answer is "in your tooling, in your cadence, written so you can forward them to the client." Ask for a sample.

7. What happens if you are sick or on holiday? Monitoring and patching should be automated; a named person should cover critical issues; documentation and access should live with you. If the answer is "it hasn’t happened yet," push.

Money and scope

8. Fixed price or hourly, and can we mark it up? Fixed for defined builds and migrations, hour buckets for ongoing work, and an estimate formatted so you can present it. Rates that change every project make your own pricing impossible.

9. How do you handle scope changes? Small changes absorbed where reasonable; anything that moves the timeline confirmed in writing with cost before work starts. The written part is what protects you with the client.

Ownership and quality

10. Who owns the code, the hosting account and the domain? Your client, through you, from day one. Repositories transferable, hosting in the client’s name, credentials in your password manager.

11. How do you test? Desktop, tablet and phone; keyboard and screen reader against WCAG 2.2 AA; Core Web Vitals; forms, tracking and integrations end to end. Ask for a QA checklist from a previous project with the client name removed.

12. What does the first month after launch look like? Redirect verification, 404 logging, a performance and security pass, and training for the client’s editors. If post-launch is "let us know if anything breaks," plan to do it yourself.

What a good first project looks like

Start with a pilot: one build, one landing-page system or one migration, fixed price, with the NDA and non-solicit signed first. Judge the estimate’s accuracy, the quality of the weekly updates and how launch day went. If all three were calm, talk about a monthly capacity arrangement. That is how most of our longest agency relationships began, and it is how we would advise any agency to start with anyone, including us. Our terms are on the For agencies page.