Real code. Real Postgres. Owned by you.

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 that runs Vercel, Linear, Cal.com, Notion, and Loom. We chose it because it gives us a monorepo with real typed server actions, edge deployment everywhere, a mature ecosystem, and zero lock-in. Every Perth client ends up on GitHub, Vercel, and Neon, all on their own accounts, paying the same bill we pay. If a new framework earns its place in five years, we will move. Until then, this is the most honest stack in production.

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. We use MongoDB only when the use case is genuinely unstructured and query patterns are chaotic, which is rarer than the internet thinks. Neon and Supabase both give you serverless Postgres with a free tier, which means you start small and scale without rearchitecting.

Vercel, in your own account, on your own billing. Production, staging, and preview environments are all live from day one. Every pull request gets its own preview URL so you can click on a staging link before anything ships to the real domain. We wire up GitHub Actions for tests and type checks, set up the environment variables, configure custom domains, and hand you the keys. If you ever want to migrate off Vercel to Cloudflare or AWS, the code is standard Next.js and moves cleanly. No vendor lock-in at the framework layer. The database lives on Neon or Supabase, also on your account. You own the infrastructure, we just set it up.

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 Perth dev 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.

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 thirty to sixty minute screen recording where the founder walks through the codebase file by file. Your internal dev or your next Perth 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 Perth 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.