Built like Stripe.
Shipped like Linear.
Owned by you.
Custom Next.js builds for Melbourne founders, operators, and technical buyers. The same stack the Cremorne crew already runs. Portals, platforms, and SaaS MVPs shipped in days to weeks, on your GitHub, under your billing.
The city that knows the stack.
Melbourne is Australia’s deepest pool of senior engineering talent. The Cremorne corridor alone hosts REA Group, SEEK, MYOB, and Carsales, more than 700 tech businesses, and over 10,000 workers, contributing $4 billion a year to the state economy. Canva runs a campus in Collingwood. Atlassian, Square, and Stripe all hire out of the same talent pool. The Melbourne buyer who reads a Studio Slate page already knows what good engineering looks like.
Which is why the typical local agency quote lands wrong. A WordPress build with Elementor and an ACF panel is not a serious answer for a buyer whose neighbour ships production code at REA every Tuesday.
“Average senior software engineer in Melbourne, $148,950 base. The 25th to 75th percentile sits between $125,000 and $166,500.”
Glassdoor, Senior Software Engineer Melbourne, February 2026 (2,363 reported salaries). Before super, leave, tax, equipment, and 12-week recruitment runway.
The big tech employers in Cremorne and Collingwood are paying global rates and locking up the senior talent. The Sydney CBD agencies bill Melbourne as a flight invoice. The offshore shops cannot read the room. A Melbourne founder who actually understands the stack deserves a third option, and not the one that comes back as a WordPress quote.
Four ways to ship custom software in Melbourne. Three are a tax.
First-year cost to ship a real custom build, AUD
Sources: Glassdoor Melbourne senior software engineer salary, February 2026 ($148,950 base, 2,363 reported salaries), loaded with 11.5% super and conservative overhead. Cremorne and CBD agency range from published Australian dev agency rate cards, April 2026. Offshore range from Clutch.co India and Eastern Europe pricing. Studio Slate figures are the web-app-starter, web-app-professional, and web-app-premium tiers below.
The first in-house engineer takes a quarter to find and costs more than every Studio Slate tier put together.
Canva, REA, SEEK, and Square are paying $200K plus for senior Next.js engineers and the recruiters know it. The contractors are booked. The CBD agencies treat Melbourne as a six month retainer. A one-off custom build on a proven stack, shipped in days to weeks, then handed over cleanly to your internal team, is the only one of the four that respects the calendar.
The stack matters. Especially in this city.
We ship Next.js on Vercel with Postgres on Neon and Stripe for payments. The same architecture that runs Linear, Cal.com, and Cursor, and the same primitives a SEEK or REA staff engineer would reach for on a Sunday side project. Typed server actions, edge deployment, preview URLs on every pull request, migrations in version control. When your first internal hire opens the repo, nothing in there surprises them.
Shipped, not scoped.
A CBD agency spends a month on discovery, a month on Figma, and a month arguing about component libraries before writing a line of production code. We scope tightly in the first call, write code on day one, and push a staging link by the end of the week. Equal Legal went from an empty repo to shipped AI legal documents in two and a half weeks. The Cremorne in-house equivalent is still in the recruitment phase.
Two production builds. Real users. Real code on GitHub.
Editorial first
Type, layout, and restraint that holds up next to a Brunswick design studio’s print portfolio. Editorial New for headlines, Neue Montreal for body, Supply Mono for the technical detail. The same care goes into a Cremorne SaaS as it does into a Carlton restaurant brochure.
Real code on GitHub
Every project lives in your GitHub organisation from the first commit. Pull requests, code review, version history, branch protection, conventional commits. Your first internal Cremorne hire opens it in Cursor and ships their first PR by Friday.
You own the deployment
Vercel team on your account. Neon project on your account. Stripe on your account. Domain on your account. We collaborate during the build and disappear cleanly after handover. No platform lock-in, no retainer hostage, no 36 month hosting contract.
Scope-based pricing. Published numbers.
Three tiers. Every tier includes 100% code ownership, 30 days of post-launch support, and the same nationwide pricing our Sydney clients see. No Melbourne mark-up.
Portal
$9,7974-7 daysInternal tools, client dashboards, admin panels.
- Client portal or admin dashboard
- Postgres schema + typed server actions
- Authentication + role-based access
- Responsive design, deployed to your Vercel
- GitHub handover + Loom walkthrough
Need it sooner?
Platform
$19,9971-2 weeksMulti-feature business apps and workflow automation.
- Booking, scheduling, or workflow automation
- Multi-role auth with permissions
- Third-party integrations (CRM, APIs, Stripe)
- Email and webhook automation
- Admin panel with analytics
Need it sooner?
SaaS MVP
$34,9972-4 weeksLaunch-ready SaaS products with billing and multi-tenancy.
- Subscription billing via Stripe
- User onboarding and lifecycle emails
- Multi-tenant architecture
- Public API + documentation
- Production monitoring and logging
Need it sooner?
50% upfront, 50% on delivery. Maintenance from $497/mo. Nationwide pricing, no Melbourne mark-up, no remote tax. Express delivery starts the build the next business morning and ships in half the standard timeline.
Four steps.
One engineer.
Sydney based, delivered to Melbourne remotely. Built Equal Legal (AI legal documents in 2.5 weeks), Sub Tracker, and Plan Flowers. Melbourne clients get code quality that respects the city’s engineering standards because the work is in version control, not a meeting room.
Scoping call
30 minutes on Zoom. We map the data model on a shared screen, pick the stack decisions upfront, identify the integrations, and lock scope. You leave with a written quote and a delivery window. Same time zone, same business hours, no calendar gymnastics. No discovery phase invoice, no Figma bill, no twelve slide deck.
Production build
We provision the GitHub repo, the Vercel project, the Neon database, and the Stripe account on your team. Code starts on day one. You get preview URLs on every pull request, a staging link from day two, and a running list of decisions in the repo README. Changes go through proper pull requests, not email attachments.
Ship and integrate
Final review, test suite green, environment variables locked, analytics wired, error monitoring configured. Production domain cut over with zero downtime. We stay on the Slack channel for the first week to handle anything weird in the wild. No war room, no handover ceremony, just a calm launch.
Handover and support
30 days of post-launch support included. A full handover document plus a Loom walkthrough of the codebase file by file. Your internal dev or a Melbourne contractor can keep shipping features without us. Optional maintenance from $497 a month if you want to keep the relationship going.
Technical questions.
Melbourne deserves engineering, not template fatigue.
30 minutes on Zoom. Bring the data model and the integrations list. Leave with a written quote, a delivery window, and an honest answer on whether we are the right fit.