Web platform development in Melbourne
Research institutes around Parkville run studies that need more than a spreadsheet and less than an enterprise clinical system. A registry that follows patients for years, a trial that recruits participants online, a biobank that tracks consent for every sample: each is a web platform used by researchers, clinicians and participants who need very different views of the same records.
We build those platforms with the permissions designed first: participants see and change their own consent, researchers see de-identified data unless they are approved for more, and study coordinators see who has been contacted and who needs following up. On FM360 we built a web app, a mobile app and a phone page on one backend for a healthcare estate, and the same discipline applies: one source of truth, several doors into it, each door with the right lock.
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.
We replace the role column with a permission model that can express teams, access to individual resources and roles the customer defines, add SAML or OIDC sign-in, and write the audit log their security questionnaire will ask about.
Or very nearly did. We find every query that can cross a tenant boundary, enforce the tenant in one layer rather than in every handler, and add tests that try to read across that boundary on purpose.
We build the admin side properly: search across organisations, an audited view-as-user mode, and screens for access and usage. Support stops asking an engineer to run a query against production every time a customer says something looks wrong.
An early Next.js app with auth stitched into middleware, a custom server, and a release process that lives in someone's head. We move it forward in small steps, with preview environments and a pipeline anyone on the team can ship from.
A Next.js platform scoped per organisation, where an administrator can view the app as any other user and each Tableau report opens only for people granted it.
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.
What is wrong with a role column?+
Nothing, until you have more than one kind of customer. A role says who a user is; most real questions are about what they can do to one specific thing, inside one specific organisation. Encoded as role checks, every new requirement becomes a code change in many places. We model permissions as data, check them in one place, and test them like any other logic.
Should we use an auth provider or build our own?+
Use a provider for identity: passwords, magic links, SSO and multi-factor. It is a solved problem and getting it wrong is expensive. Authorisation, meaning what a signed-in user may do, is specific to your product and usually belongs in your own code and database. We wire the first to the second and keep the line between them clear.
How do you handle multi-tenancy?+
Usually one database with a tenant ID on every row, enforced in one place: Postgres row-level security, or a data-access layer every query has to pass through, rather than each handler remembering. A separate database per tenant is sometimes right, for one very large customer or strict isolation, and we will say if that applies to you.
Where does it get hosted?+
Wherever suits your team. Vercel is the least effort for Next.js and fine for most platforms. If cost or long-running background work make that awkward, we run it in containers on Railway, AWS or your own Kubernetes. The repository, the cloud accounts and the bill are in your name either way.
What do enterprise customers ask for, and can you build it?+
Single sign-on through SAML or OIDC, audit logs, role management, session controls, encryption and data export. We build each of them into the platform and help you answer the technical questions on a customer's checklist accurately, so the security conversation speeds the deal up instead of stalling it.