I suspect the quagmire might come as much from dealing with government institutions as it does from programming. Does the provider already have relationships that facilitate that?
If you can work around that, then the EDIFACT thing means that it is very inaccurate to say you have a "straightforward CRUD app". I am a freelancer and if I saw those two statements together it would be a red flag, like you were trying to minimize the complexity to try to pay poor rates or didn't understand what CRUD was or just wasn't thinking clearly.
EDIFACT in a modern context where we have human readable formats like JSON, looks like a nightmare. I suggest that you see if there are any libraries you could build off of such as pydifact.
You should also start trying to collect a comprehensive documentation of everything that software is doing for you. In detail. No programming team can be successful without that information and aside from the EDIFACT stuff and bureaucracy that will probably be the biggest bottleneck is discovering that.
If you can work around that, then the EDIFACT thing means that it is very inaccurate to say you have a "straightforward CRUD app". I am a freelancer and if I saw those two statements together it would be a red flag, like you were trying to minimize the complexity to try to pay poor rates or didn't understand what CRUD was or just wasn't thinking clearly.
EDIFACT in a modern context where we have human readable formats like JSON, looks like a nightmare. I suggest that you see if there are any libraries you could build off of such as pydifact.
You should also start trying to collect a comprehensive documentation of everything that software is doing for you. In detail. No programming team can be successful without that information and aside from the EDIFACT stuff and bureaucracy that will probably be the biggest bottleneck is discovering that.