Time zones
Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo run on Brasília time and don't change their clocks. New York is one hour behind Rio while the US is on daylight saving time, and two hours behind the rest of the year.
For the East Coast, the working days nearly match. For the West Coast the gap is four to five hours, which still leaves your morning for calls.
Ask which hours the studio keeps for your calls, and put the weekly call in writing.
Language
Ask for the contract, the calls and the decision log in English, not just the sales conversation. At DM Studio all three are in English for US clients.
Who you sign with
Sign with a registered company, not an individual. A Brazilian company has a CNPJ, its national tax ID, which you can ask for and look up.
Put a non-disclosure agreement in place before you share the details of your business.
Intellectual property
Under Brazilian law (Lei 9.609/1998, article 4), the rights to software developed under a contract for that purpose belong to the client unless the contract says otherwise. Because a contract can change that default, ownership should be written down, not assumed.
Ask for the code repository, the cloud accounts and the domain to sit in your company name from day one. If the studio reuses a core of its own across clients, the contract should say what is licensed to you.
Payments
Ask for invoices in US dollars, so you pay in your own currency and the exchange happens on the studio's side. DM Studio invoices from Brazil in US dollars.
Pay per stage, not upfront. Each stage should have a fixed price agreed before it starts. A small first payment opens the work, and each next payment comes after you've accepted a stage against criteria written before it started.
Data and privacy
If the studio handles personal data for you, it should do so as a data processor under a data processing agreement. Ask where the data is hosted and who has access to what. A broad promise of compliance is worth less than those answers in writing.
Questions to ask before you sign
- Is there a diagnostic with a written scope and a price for each stage?
- Are acceptance criteria written down before each stage starts?
- Do you pay for each stage after accepting it, with a small first payment?
- Does the contract put the repository, cloud accounts and domain in your company name?
- Can you leave at the end of any stage and take everything with you, documented?
- Who is your contact, and how fast do they reply?
- Is there a data processing agreement, and where is the data hosted?
- How long are bug fixes free after launch, and how does support work?
How DM Studio does it
Everything on this list goes in our contract. After launch you get 60 days of free bug fixes, and monthly support is optional, at a fixed price with a written response time. The details of each commitment are on the How we work page.