SaaS development in Melbourne
Melbourne SaaS companies tend to go overseas early, and the first large customer in the US or Europe changes the architecture. Their users expect the product to be fast from their own region, their IT team wants single sign-on and control over who has access, and their finance team wants invoices in their own currency. A product that runs in one Australian region with one shared database was fine until that signature.
We help SaaS products make that move: a second region where your customers need speed, tenant isolation enforced in the database, single sign-on and the exportable activity history larger customers expect, and billing that copes with several currencies. We plan the move so existing customers notice nothing but a faster product, and we write down how it all works so your own engineers can run it.
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.
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 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.
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.