Most "best Medusa agency" content on the internet is written by an agency about itself. That's not necessarily dishonest, but it's not a neutral evaluation either, and it's not what you need when you're about to commit a budget and a quarter of engineering time to a vendor. Here's a framework that doesn't depend on trusting anyone's self-ranking, including ours.
Ask to see something real, not a deck
A case-study page with a logo and three bullet points proves nothing. Ask for a live, clickable production storefront built on Medusa, ideally one you can open right now in another tab. Open the network tab. Check if the checkout actually completes a test order in staging. An agency confident in its work will hand this over without friction; one that stalls, cites NDAs for everything, or can only show static screenshots is telling you something.
Ask who owns deployments after launch
This is the question that actually separates agencies. Get a specific answer to: after launch, who deploys code changes, who's paged if the checkout goes down at 2am, and what's the SLA if it does? "We'll figure it out" or "that's usually a retainer conversation" are both fine answers if they come with specifics attached. Silence or deflection on this question means the agency hasn't thought past the handover date, which is exactly when a self-hosted framework like Medusa needs a competent operator the most.
Ask what happens if you leave
The cleanest test of whether an agency is selling you a product or a relationship: ask what you get if you end the engagement after launch. The honest, buyer-favorable answer is the full codebase, infrastructure configs, and database, in your own repository and your own cloud accounts, with no dependency on the agency's tooling to keep running. If the answer involves a proprietary dashboard, a hosting arrangement only they control, or a "migration fee" to get your own data out, that's the lock-in model, dressed up as a service.
Running a vendor shortlist for a Medusa build?
Send us the brief and we'll give you a direct answer on fit, cost shape, and timeline, including if we think Medusa, or we, aren't the right match.
Get a second opinion →Check the questions they ask you, not just the ones you ask them
A strong agency interrogates your actual commerce logic before quoting: B2B pricing tiers, subscription billing, multi-warehouse fulfilment, whatever is specific to your business. An agency that quotes a fixed price off a one-page brief, without a discovery call that digs into edge cases, is either very experienced with your exact shape of business or hasn't scoped it properly, and you won't know which until you're mid-build.
The short version
Live production proof, a specific post-launch ownership answer, and a clean exit story if the relationship ends. Any agency that clears all three, regardless of what marketing copy or SERP position they hold, is worth a real conversation. See our own answers to these in how a Kryeo engagement actually runs, and for the architecture question behind "should this even be Medusa," read is Medusa production-ready in 2026.