Custom software development in Melbourne
The Port of Melbourne keeps a whole industry of freight forwarders, customs brokers and transport operators busy, and much of their day still runs on email, spreadsheets and portals that do not talk to each other. Container availability, detention deadlines, customs status and truck bookings are tracked by people copying information between systems, and a missed deadline costs real money.
Custom software earns its place in exactly that gap. We build tools that pull status from the systems you already use, show every shipment's next deadline in one place, and alert the right person before a charge applies. We integrate through supported interfaces rather than screen-scraping where we can, and leave your core freight system untouched. If a product on the market covers most of the need, we will say so before writing anything.
Melbourne's software market is built on products rather than projects. SEEK, REA Group and MYOB run from the city, Culture Amp started here, and a generation of engineers learned their trade inside marketplaces and SaaS businesses that sell well beyond Australia. The SaaS companies we hear from have usually found their market and are now paying for early decisions: a data model that assumed one customer type, permissions that started as a role column, and infrastructure in a single region when their newest customers are in the US or Europe.
Health and education are the other two pillars. The Melbourne Biomedical Precinct around Parkville brings together hospitals, research institutes, biotech firms and universities, and they need registries, trial platforms, patient apps and operational tools that handle sensitive records carefully and still suit a busy clinician between patients. The universities (Melbourne, Monash, RMIT and the rest) run student systems, learning platforms and research data at a scale that rarely fits off-the-shelf software, and their students judge every portal against the apps on their phones. And the Port of Melbourne keeps a large freight and logistics industry busy, much of it still run on email and spreadsheets.
Hiring costs a little less than in Sydney. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Melbourne at A$109,570, from 329 reported salaries, and the engineers who have already scaled a product are the ones every scale-up wants at the same time. A platform problem can sit on the roadmap for quarters while that hire is found. That is where we fit: senior engineers on a defined piece of work within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, and we move them to suit your team. Your morning stays with your own people, and the afternoon is when you talk to the engineer writing your code, in stand-ups, reviews and design decisions. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go, so the work stays readable long after the engagement ends.
We are the right fit for a platform problem your product team has no time for, a defined piece of work with a clear end, or the months before your own hires start. Senior engineers arrive within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two weeks, and agencies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
Approvals, schedules or stock, tracked in a shared file with colour codes only one person understands. We turn it into an application with proper records, permissions and history, so you can see who changed what and when, and nobody works from an old copy.
Staff copy data from one system into another by hand, and the two slowly drift apart. We connect them through their APIs, clean up the data where it crosses over, and alert someone when a sync fails instead of letting it fail quietly.
The numbers exist, spread across exports and inboxes, and someone assembles a report by hand every Monday. We pull them into one place, build the dashboard the people making decisions will actually open, and check it is current rather than trusting the job that feeds it.
A legacy application still runs the business and every change to it is a risk. We map what it really does, move it piece by piece onto something maintainable, and keep both running until the last piece has landed. No weekend cut-over.
A facilities operations platform for a healthcare estate, built so supervisors can see what is overdue and what keeps coming back without exporting spreadsheets by hand.
Read the write-up →Asked by Melbourne teams.
How do you work with teams in Melbourne?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in that window, so your mornings stay with your own people. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and the person on every call is the engineer who writes the code.
Do you build for Melbourne SaaS and marketplace companies?+
Yes, and it is the work Melbourne asks for most. We untangle data models that assumed one customer type, turn a role column into proper permissions, add single sign-on and a second region for the first large overseas customer, and tune search and messaging for marketplaces that have outgrown their first version. We work inside your codebase, alongside your product engineers, starting with whatever is slowing them down most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Melbourne?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Melbourne at around A$110,000. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work can start within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you can judge us on what ships.
Can you work white-label for a Melbourne agency?+
Yes. If your agency wins more build work than your developers can carry, we work under your name. Your client sees your team and your process, we join calls as your engineers, and the code goes into your client's repositories from the first commit. You keep the client relationship. An NDA is signed before you share anything specific, and the runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
Why not buy an off-the-shelf tool?+
Often you should, and we will tell you when. If a product already does most of what you need, configuring it is cheaper than building. Custom software earns its cost when the process is how you compete, when you pay for several tools to do one job badly, or when the workarounds cost more staff time than the software would.
Can you work with the systems we already have?+
That is usually the job. Most internal tools are valuable because of what they connect to: an ERP, a work-order system, a CRM, a finance package. If it has an API, we integrate with it. If all it offers is a nightly export, we can work with that too, and we will tell you how fresh the data can honestly be.
How do you find out what we actually need?+
By talking to the people who do the work, not only the people who asked for the tool. We watch the spreadsheet being used, collect the edge cases everyone handles from memory, and write the process down before we build anything. The first release covers the core of it; the exceptions follow once people are using it.
What happens to our old data?+
It comes with you. We migrate it, check the counts and totals against the source, and keep the old system or spreadsheet readable until your team is confident nothing was lost. Where the old data is inconsistent, we show you the records that do not fit rather than quietly guessing what they meant.
Who looks after it once it is live?+
You choose. We can stay on at our hourly rate for changes and fixes, or hand it to your own team with runbooks, architecture notes and a recorded walkthrough. Internal tools change as the business changes, so we build them to be changed by someone other than us.