MVP development in Brisbane
Brisbane founders often start by solving a problem they met inside mining, health or government, which means their first customer is a large organisation with a pilot budget and a procurement process. The pilot needs something working, and it needs it before the budget cycle closes, not after a local agency has built a full platform.
Our fixed-price two-week starter is built for that. We agree the one flow the pilot has to prove, build it on a stack you can grow rather than throw away, and hand it over with a written list of what must change before real customer data goes through it. Because the overlap lands in your afternoon all year, you can run the pilot in the morning and review changes with us after lunch.
The state is one of Brisbane's largest software buyers. The Queensland Government, its departments and its hospital and health services run a large share of the city's technology work, directly and through the consultancies and suppliers around them. They need public services that work for someone on fibre in the inner city and someone on a weak mobile signal in a remote community, and internal systems that let a small team look after a very big state.
Mining services are the second pillar. Queensland's mining equipment, technology and services firms sell into the Bowen Basin and to mines around the world, and many run their engineering and head offices from Brisbane. Their software problems come from distance: equipment reporting over intermittent links, maintenance data from sites hours from the nearest city, and field crews working on rosters. Health adds a third: a large public health system spread across the state, where a clinician in a regional town and a specialist in Brisbane need the same record. Looking further out, the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games are already driving infrastructure work across the south-east, and the tourism, events and food businesses around them are planning for demand their systems have never seen.
Hiring costs less than in Sydney or Melbourne. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Brisbane at A$101,980, from 87 reported salaries. Specialist skills are the harder part: an engineer who has built for remote sites, offline field work or a booking spike is a rare hire in any city. 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, moved to suit your team. Neither Queensland nor India changes its clocks, so the window sits at the same point in your day all year round. Your morning belongs to your own team; the afternoon is for stand-ups, reviews and decisions with the engineer who writes your code, and runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go.
We are the right fit when a system your team has no time to build has a clear shape, when you need senior engineers on it within days, or when a hire is still months from starting. Begin with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on what ships. Agencies and consultancies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
Every feature is marked essential. We work with you to find the one journey a user must complete for the idea to be proven or disproven, build that properly, and write the rest down as a list for after launch.
It was built with a no-code tool or over a weekend, and real users are now finding its limits. We keep what works, move the data somewhere you own, and rebuild the parts that break without taking the product offline.
A demo that works in the meeting and then has to become the product. We build it on a real database with real sign-in from the start, so the version you demo is the version you keep, not a mock-up you throw away.
You need someone to make the technical decisions and explain them in plain language. We write down every choice that is expensive to reverse, why we made it and what changing it would cost, so whoever you hire next can pick it up.
Began in 2024 as a script that turned monthly exports into charts, and grew step by step into a web app, a mobile app, a technician phone page and the one backend under all three.
Read the write-up →Asked by Brisbane teams.
How do you work with teams in Brisbane?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Neither Queensland nor India changes its clocks, so the window stays put all year. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in it. 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 mining and METS companies?+
Yes. Brisbane's mining equipment, technology and services firms need software around their equipment, and that is what we build: backends that accept late and out-of-order data from remote sites, models that predict failures from vibration and temperature readings, offline apps for field crews, and roster and competency tools for contractors. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the problem that costs you most on site.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Brisbane?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Brisbane at around A$102,000. 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 add capacity while we wait for a hire?+
Yes. If a Brisbane role is open and the roadmap is still moving, we can take a defined piece of it now. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece, or embed one engineer at $5,400 a month. Runbooks and architecture notes are written as we go and the code sits in your repositories from the first commit, so when your hire starts, they inherit work they can read and extend.
What does the fixed-price two-week starter cover?+
A defined slice of the product, agreed in writing before we start. For an MVP it is usually the core flow, working end to end against a real database. It costs $2,800. You get something running at the end and you keep the code either way, so you can judge us on output before committing to the rest of the build.
How long does an MVP take?+
It depends on what the smallest honest version is, which is why we scope before we quote. The two-week starter usually answers the question: by the end of it one flow works, and you have a written estimate for the rest with its assumptions listed. We would rather cut scope with you than promise a date we would miss.
Why Next.js and PostgreSQL?+
Because they are boring in the right way. Both are widely known, so you can hire for them later. Postgres will carry you a long way past your first paying customers, and Next.js gives you a web app and an API in one codebase. If the product is mobile-first, we build the app in React Native on the same backend.
Will we have to rewrite it later?+
Not if we do our job. The shortcuts we take are in scope, not in structure: fewer features, plainer screens, manual steps behind the scenes. The data model, sign-in, permissions and deploys are built properly from the first week, because those are the parts that force a rewrite when they are wrong.
Who owns the code and the accounts?+
You do, from the first commit. Repositories, hosting, domains and payment accounts are created in your name, not ours. If we set something up ourselves to save time, we transfer it to you before the first invoice. An MVP you cannot take to another team is a liability, not an asset.