How to hire a FiveM developer

The FiveM market runs on Discord, and Discord has no reviews, no history and no receipts. That puts the check on you. Fortunately most of what you need to know shows up in the first conversation, before anything is at stake.

Ask to see work, not screenshots

Screenshots prove someone can take a screenshot. What you want is either a server you can join and use the thing on, or a walkthrough of the code with the developer explaining a decision in it. Someone who built a script can tell you why the validation sits server-side and what happens if a player spams the event. Someone who resold it cannot.

If the work is under NDA or the server is gone, that is normal and not a red flag. Ask them to walk you through how they would build yours instead. The reasoning is the sample.

Ask what happens when it breaks

This is the question that separates the two groups. Good answers sound boring: reproduce it, check the server console, look at what changed, fix the cause. Bad answers are confident and vague, or they assume the problem is always your other scripts.

Follow up with: what is your support window, and what falls inside it? A developer who has done this before has a ready answer, because he has been asked before.

Red flags

• A quote before any questions about your framework, your player count or what the script has to do.
• Full payment up front from a stranger, or payment through a method with no recourse at all.
• Escrow or obfuscation on a script you commissioned. You paid for it. You should be able to read it.
• No willingness to put the scope in writing. If it is not written down, the argument later is about memory.
• Promising a large system in a day. Speed is not the flex it looks like; it usually means the edge cases are not in the plan.
• Getting annoyed by questions. You are about to give this person access to your server.

Put the boring things in writing

It does not need a contract from a lawyer. A message you both agreed to, covering five things, prevents almost every dispute:

• What the script does, as a list, including what it does not do.
• The price, and whether it is fixed or hourly with a cap.
• The delivery date, and what happens if it slips.
• How many revision rounds are included, and what counts as a revision rather than a new feature.
• The support window after delivery, and what falls inside it.

Access, carefully

A developer building a script does not need your database password, your txAdmin owner account or your Cloudflare login. Give a test server or a staging environment, and give production access only when there is a reason. Make your own backup before anyone touches the live box, and rotate anything you shared once the work is done.

This is not about suspecting the person you hired. It is that access you never granted cannot be the cause of your worst week.

Start small

If you have a large project, do not make it the first thing you buy from someone. Start with a small paid piece of it. You learn how they communicate, how they handle a change of mind, and whether the code is readable, and you learn it for the price of the small piece rather than the whole build.