Shipped from
Surry Hills.
Owned by you.
Custom Next.js builds for Sydney founders, technical buyers, and operators who wanted a real product and kept getting quoted a WordPress theme. Equal Legal went from empty repo to production AI in 2.5 weeks. Same architecture is available to your Sydney team this month.
Sydney has the talent. Sydney gets the WordPress quote.
Sydney is the largest tech market in Australia. Atlassian runs the second-biggest office tower in the CBD. Canva sits in Surry Hills. AWS has three availability zones on shore. Stone and Chalk runs a 30,000 square metre innovation precinct out of Tech Central. Tank Stream Labs has accelerated hundreds of founders out of Pyrmont. The engineering talent is world class and the buyers know it.
What the buyers keep getting, when they ask for a custom build, is a WordPress quote with a theme skin and a disabled plugin list. Or a $200K discovery engagement from a CBD digital consultancy that takes six months to produce a Figma file.
“Average Senior Software Engineer in Sydney, $153,500 base. Typical range sits between $130,000 and $180,000, with top earners above $206,000.”
Glassdoor, Senior Software Engineer Sydney, March 2026 (3,905 reported salaries). Before super, leave, payroll tax, benefits, equipment, and twelve months of onboarding.
A Sydney founder reading this already knows the spread. The question is not whether the talent exists, the question is whether the build ships before Q3. Hiring is a six month cycle. A CBD agency is a twelve week cycle. Offshore is a coin flip with a rework clause. We ship this month from a studio that lives in the same city you do.
Four ways to ship a Sydney custom build. Three of them blow the quarter.
First-year cost to ship a production web app, Sydney, AUD
Sources: Glassdoor Senior Software Engineer Sydney, March 2026 ($153,500 average base across 3,905 salaries, loaded with 11.5% super, payroll tax, equipment, and recruiting fees). Sydney agency range from published rate cards of Mantel Group, Shorthand, Icon Agency, and comparable CBD digital consultancies. Offshore range from Clutch.co Eastern Europe and South Asia pricing. Studio Slate figures are the Portal, Platform, and SaaS MVP tiers below.
The first Sydney senior dev hire takes six months to find and costs more than every Studio Slate tier stacked on top of each other.
Sydney salaries are global now. The senior contractors are booked. The CBD agencies charge for a project manager, an account manager, a junior designer, and a senior designer in the same sprint. The offshore option is a coin flip. 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 and the balance sheet.
The stack matters. It is not a detail.
Next.js on Vercel with Postgres on Neon and Stripe for payments. The same architecture that runs Linear, Cal.com, and Cursor. Typed server actions, edge deployment, preview URLs on every pull request, migrations in version control. When your internal dev opens the repo next year, everything is where they expect it. No vendor lock-in at the framework layer.
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.
Two production builds. Real users. Shipped from Sydney.
Sydney based
The founder lives and works in Sydney. Meetings in Surry Hills, Pyrmont, the CBD, Redfern, or your office if that helps the build. Same time zone, same city, no travel budget, no remote premium.
Real code on GitHub
Every project lives in your GitHub organisation from the first commit. Pull requests, code review, branch protection, migrations in version control. Your next dev opens it in Cursor and understands it in an afternoon.
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.
Scope-based pricing. Published numbers.
Three tiers. Every tier includes 100% code ownership, 30 days of post-launch support, and the same published price our Perth and Brisbane clients see. No Sydney CBD markup.
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. Same Sydney published price nationwide. Express delivery starts the build the next business morning and ships in half the standard timeline.
Four steps.
One engineer.
Sydney based. Built Equal Legal (AI legal documents in 2.5 weeks), Sub Tracker, Plan Flowers, and Domain Spy (caught a $10B acquisition fourteen days early). Knows what real engineering looks like because he ships it from Surry Hills.
Scope call or coffee
15 minutes on Zoom or half an hour in a Surry Hills cafe, whichever helps the build ship faster. 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. 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 new Sydney contractor can keep shipping features without us. Optional maintenance from $497 a month if you want to keep the relationship going.
Technical questions.
A Sydney build, shipped from Sydney, owned by you.
15 minutes on Zoom or a coffee in Surry Hills. 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 team for your build.