Built like Stripe. Shipped like Linear. Owned by you.

Hire one of them in-house if you can find one with a free quarter. Most senior engineers in Cremorne are on six month notice periods, vesting on equity, or already running a side project. Recruitment for a senior full-stack hire in Melbourne typically runs 12-16 weeks before someone signs, then another 4 weeks before they ship anything. Studio Slate is the option for the founder or CTO who needs a real build live in weeks, not a hire who lands in a quarter. The work is shipped on the same stack the Cremorne crew uses (Next.js, Postgres, TypeScript, Vercel) so when you do hire your first internal engineer, the codebase is one they recognise on day one.

Next.js (App Router) on Vercel, PostgreSQL via Neon or Supabase, Stripe for payments, TypeScript end to end, Tailwind for styling, Radix or shadcn for primitives. Auth via Clerk, NextAuth, or a custom JWT implementation depending on requirements. It is the same stack a Canva platform engineer or a SEEK staff dev would build a side project on. We chose it because it gives a typed monorepo with real server actions, edge deployment everywhere, a mature ecosystem, and zero lock-in. Every Melbourne client ends up on GitHub, Vercel, and Neon, all on their own accounts, paying the same bill we pay. No proprietary CMS, no plugin soup, no PHP runtime that needs babysitting.

Postgres, almost always. A real SQL database with foreign keys, transactions, and constraints is the difference between data you can trust in three years and data you spend a week rebuilding. Sub Tracker uses Postgres to store parsed bank statements so every transaction ties back to the statement it came from. Brief Legal uses Postgres because legal documents have relational structure and nobody wants to debug a denormalised JSON blob at midnight. Neon and Supabase both give you serverless Postgres with a Sydney region for Australian data residency, which means you start small, scale to millions of rows, and never need to rearchitect. Mongo only when the use case is genuinely unstructured, which is rarer than the internet thinks.

Yes, completely. Your GitHub organisation, your Vercel team, your Neon project, your Stripe account, your domain, your environment variables. We invite ourselves in as collaborators for the build, and the moment the project ends you revoke our access if you want. There is no proprietary CMS, no hosted builder tool, no platform we control. The codebase is a standard Next.js monorepo any Melbourne developer can open in VS Code or Cursor and understand in an afternoon. This is the opposite of WordPress with a theme full of shortcodes or a SaaS platform that charges you forever for the right to keep logging in. Your future Cremorne hire forks the repo on day one and ships their first PR by Friday.

Every project ends with a handover document and a Loom walkthrough of the architecture. The document covers the data model, the auth flow, every environment variable and what it does, the deployment pipeline, the test suite, how to run it locally, and where every third-party integration lives. The Loom is a 30 to 60 minute screen recording where the founder walks through the codebase file by file. Your internal dev or your next Melbourne contractor can be productive inside a day. No black box, no tribal knowledge, no retainer hostage situation. We have done handovers to internal teams at several clients where the brief was explicitly that we build it and then disappear, and the code has kept shipping features years later without us.

Every build includes 30 days of post-launch support at no extra cost. Bugs, small changes, questions, environment issues. After that, you have three options. One, a maintenance retainer starting at $497 a month covers bug fixes, dependency updates, and small feature additions on a monthly basis. Two, your internal dev or a Melbourne contractor takes over the codebase because everything is documented and standard. Three, you call us when you need something and we quote the specific scope. No lock-in, no 36 month hosting contracts, no minimum commitment. Most clients stay on the retainer because it is cheap insurance, but the door is unlocked the day we ship.