No way to verify a supplier's delivery reliability before signing — leading to vendor lock-in and operational hostage situations

Summary

Buyers committing to overseas manufacturers or specialized contractors have no fast, sourced way to assess whether a vendor will actually deliver maintainable, complete work — documentation, handover quality, track record — before they pay or sign. In this case a contractor delivered a critical warehouse automation codebase with zero documentation, leaving the team locked into an unvetted single vendor and facing downtime costs that exceed the original contract. Existing due-diligence options focus on legitimacy (is this a real company?) but not on delivery-risk and reliability signals (has this vendor left other clients stranded?). Traditional investigators are expensive and slow, and thin websites/registries give no reputation or past-performance signal. This is unsolved: there is no fast, sourced trust score that surfaces delivery-history red flags before a contract is signed, making it high-pain and high-value for SMB procurement leads and cross-border sourcers.