SaaS development in Sydney
Sydney SaaS companies that start with small customers eventually want the bank, the insurer or the government agency down the road, and large customers ask for different things. They want single sign-on through their own identity provider, users added and removed automatically, roles that match their organisation, an exportable history of who did what, and their data kept apart from every other customer's. A product built for startups tends to be missing exactly those features.
We build the parts that make a SaaS product ready for those customers: data isolation enforced in the database rather than trusted to the application, SAML and OIDC sign-on, user provisioning, fine-grained roles, and activity history the customer can export. We build each one so it still works for your smallest customer, and we write down how it works so your sales team can answer questions accurately.
Sydney is where Australian money keeps its head office. Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and Macquarie run their groups from the city, the large insurers are here, and around them sits a dense fintech sector in payments, lending and wealth. The software these firms need is rarely a brand-new product. It is the work around the core: payment flows that settle in seconds, onboarding and lending journeys customers actually finish, reports that agree with each other, and the internal tools that keep claims and complaints moving.
Real-time payments have raised the bar. On the New Payments Platform money moves in seconds, and PayTo lets a business take agreed payments straight from a customer's account, so a lender or fintech built around overnight batch files now needs instant confirmations and a ledger that never records the same payment twice. Sydney is also where Atlassian and Canva started, so its buyers have been trained by good software built down the road. A clunky internal tool or a slow sign-up flow is noticed here in a way it might not be elsewhere. Beyond finance, the city has a large property and strata sector, online retailers shipping across a very big country, and a startup scene around Tech Central.
Hiring reflects all of that. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at A$119,602, from 526 reported salaries, and experienced engineers are contested by the banks, the big product companies and every well-funded startup at once. A team that needs a payments engineer or an extra pair of senior hands for a quarter can wait a long time for the right hire. That is where we are useful: a defined piece of work, started 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; 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 whoever joins your team next inherits work they can read.
We are the right fit when you have a defined piece of work and want senior engineers on it within days, or when the Sydney hire you need is months away and the roadmap keeps moving. Start with a fixed-price two-week piece and judge us on the output. 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 Sydney teams.
How do you work with teams in Sydney?+
We are in Bengaluru and share four hours of live overlap with you every day, in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. That is when we join stand-ups, review pull requests and take design calls. 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. Between calls, progress is in your tracker and your repositories.
Do you build for Sydney banks, insurers and fintechs?+
Yes, and that is most of what Sydney asks us for. We build payment backends that handle NPP and PayTo without recording a payment twice, sign-up and lending journeys customers finish on their phone, complaint and claims tools that take the reading off skilled staff, and data pipelines that make finance and risk reports agree. We work inside your codebase and your cloud, starting with the one flow that matters most.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Sydney?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Sydney at around A$120,000. 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 starts within days of the call. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
Can you take over an app another team built?+
Yes. It is a common starting point for Sydney products whose agency or founding engineers have moved on. We read the code, run it, and write down how it fits together and where the risks sit. The first fixed-price two-week piece is usually one real fix or feature, so you see the handover working while the architecture notes build up. The code stays in your repositories throughout, as it always would.
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.