Your developer may own the code you paid for
Many freelance developers keep the GitHub repository under their own personal account. This leaves you without real control of the product you paid to build.
Ask a small business owner where their website code lives, and most cannot answer. The developer built it, deployed it and never mentioned a repository at all. If the site runs on custom code, a GitHub repository or something like it holds every line of it. The question is whose name sits at the top of that account.
In practice, that account often belongs to the individual developer, not to your business. They open a personal GitHub profile, create the project there, and hand you a working link to the live site. The code stays with them. You get the product, not the source.
This works fine until it does not. A developer moves on to other clients, stops responding to messages, or closes the account entirely. Suddenly the person holding the only complete copy of your product is unreachable, and you have no way to hand the project to anyone else.
who actually owns the code
Ownership of code is usually settled by contract, not by convention. Many freelance agreements say nothing about it at all. Without a clause assigning intellectual property to the client, the developer may retain rights over the work, even though you paid for it in full.
A repository under a personal account makes this worse in practice, even where the contract is clear on paper. Access is control. If you cannot log into the repository, request its history or add your own collaborators, the legal position matters little from day to day.
The site you paid for should sit inside an account you can log into on your own.
what to ask before the project starts
Before you commission a marketing site, a web application or any other product, ask where the repository will live. A studio that plans to work with you for the long term should be comfortable creating it inside an organisation account you control. That should happen from the outset, not as an afterthought.
Ask, too, what happens at handover. Do you receive administrator access? Can you add or remove collaborators yourself? Is the licence for any third-party components documented somewhere you can find it? These are ordinary questions, and a studio confident in its own work will answer them without hesitation.
At Yunaristech, every repository for a fixed price project is created inside an account you own from the first commit. You watch the build happen, not just the result. When the project ends, you keep full administrator access, the entire commit history and the freedom to bring in another developer whenever you choose.
A fixed price should buy you a finished product and the means to keep it running without the original developer. Ownership of the repository is part of that price, not an extra you negotiate for later.