Ask HN: How risky is it to go with a freelancer to build a website?

I have a friend who has a small Shopify store. They now need an extra layer of complexity that they can't fully get with Shopify. They are planning to get a website built by a freelancer and asked me for advice. My reply was to delay that for as long as possible since it's costly and risky and deal with the extra complexity by doing some tasks manually so that they have control over their site. Am I overly pessimistic ?