SaaS development in Brisbane
A Brisbane SaaS company that sells to Queensland councils learns quickly that every council is a little different. Each has its own departments, its own names for things, its own property and mapping systems, and staff who expect to sign in with the account they already use. The first council customer usually gets a product shaped around them, and the second one exposes every assumption that was built in along the way.
We build the parts of a SaaS product that let one codebase serve many councils: tenant isolation enforced in the database, configuration instead of custom forks, single sign-on, clean integrations with property and mapping systems, and activity history each council can export. The aim is that onboarding the next council takes days of setup rather than weeks of code, and that a fix for one council reaches every council at once.
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.
Then SCIM, then role mapping, then a security questionnaire. We add SAML and OIDC through a provider or your own identity stack, provision users from their directory, and keep the permission model working for the self-serve customers who never asked for any of it.
Shared tables with a tenant column and every query trusted to filter on it. We enforce isolation below the application, with Postgres row-level security or separate schemas, and write tests that try to read across tenants and must fail.
Moving from seats to usage, adding a free tier, or selling annual contracts beside monthly plans. We model plans and entitlements separately from the payment provider, meter usage into a ledger you can audit, and make proration and dunning tested code rather than a monthly surprise.
Every larger customer asks who changed what, who can reach production and how access ends when someone leaves. We build exportable audit logs, least-privilege access and change control through pull requests, so your answer is a screen, not a spreadsheet.
A multi-tenant platform scoped per organisation, with admin screens for users, access and login alerts, and a way for an administrator to view the app as any user.
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.
Shared database, separate schemas, or a database per tenant?+
Shared tables with row-level security for most products, because it is the cheapest to run and the simplest to migrate. Separate schemas or databases when a customer contractually needs isolation, data kept in a particular region, or its own backup schedule. We design so a large tenant can move to its own database later without rewriting the application, because that request usually arrives with the biggest contract.
When should we add SSO and SCIM?+
Before the deal that needs them, not in the first month. Design the user and organisation model so SSO slots in without a data migration, then switch it on when a paying customer asks. A provider such as WorkOS saves you building SAML and SCIM yourself, which rarely pays off until enterprise customers are a large share of your revenue.
Stripe, or a merchant of record like Paddle?+
Stripe gives you the most control over plans, invoices and the checkout. A merchant of record such as Paddle takes a larger fee and becomes the seller, handling tax wherever you sell. For a small team selling internationally from the start, the merchant of record is often the simpler path. We lay out both at your price point before you choose.
Can you make the product ready for enterprise buyers?+
Yes. Enterprise buyers ask for the same things every time: single sign-on, directory provisioning, roles they can define, an audit log they can export, and admin screens their IT team can use. We design those into the data model early, so saying yes to the next large customer is a configuration change rather than a quarter of rework.
What have you built that carries over to SaaS?+
Multi-tenancy, per-organisation access and admin tooling run through most of what we build. FM360 is a multi-tenant platform with all three: organisations, apps and access managed per customer, usage analytics and login alerts. Subscriptions and billing logic we build inside the product, tested like any other code rather than left to a dashboard.