Service guide · Berlin
Almost every studio in the city writes JavaScript, which makes the label nearly useless as a filter. What distinguishes teams is not the framework on their site but how they handle the parts of the job that have no framework: state that outgrew its design, a build that got slow, an interface that has to work on a five-year-old phone.
A studio with one framework and strong opinions is usually a better bet than one that claims all of them. The question is not which they use but what they would keep from your existing setup and why. A team that would rewrite everything has told you they are not interested in your constraints.
The choice matters most for hiring later. Whatever is chosen, you will eventually need to hire for it or hand it to someone else. In Berlin the pool is deep for the mainstream choices and thin for anything fashionable, and thin means expensive at exactly the moment you have no leverage.
Ask how they handle a page that has to render fast on a slow connection. A team that has done this reaches for measurement, budgets, and cutting work; a team that has not reaches for a caching layer and hope.
Ask what happens when a dependency they rely on is abandoned. The good answer is boring: fewer dependencies, pinned versions, and a plan for the two or three that genuinely matter.
Ask about accessibility without using the word. Describe someone navigating the interface with a keyboard only and see whether they have thought about focus at all.
Hourly bands commonly quoted in the city. Specialist work is priced by scarcity rather than by seniority, which is why the top of the range sits above general agency rates.