An Australian development team
OK200 is a software and app development company based in Melbourne, working with clients around Australia. We have been building custom software in-house since 2016, and the same people who scope your product are the ones who write it. There is no account manager in the middle and no team you never meet.
Every engagement starts with strategy: working out what needs to exist, why, and for whom. Only then do we scope it, and only then do we quote a build. That order is the whole point, because a number produced before anyone understands the product is a guess with a decimal place on it.
Tell us what you are buildingMost people searching for an Australian software development company are really deciding whether to stay in Australia at all. It is worth being honest about that, because the offshore hourly rate genuinely is lower and sometimes offshore is the right call. We will tell you when we think it is.
What the hourly rate leaves out is your own time. Work that arrives needing to be specified in more detail, reviewed more carefully, and corrected more often is not cheaper once you count the hours you spend on it, and it is considerably more expensive if a chunk of it has to be rebuilt. The saving is often smaller than the sticker price suggests.
The practical case for staying onshore is less about quality and more about friction. Shared working hours mean a question asked at 10am is answered before lunch rather than overnight. Being able to sit in the same room for the sessions that need it, usually the early strategy work, changes the quality of the decisions. And there is someone accountable to you under Australian law, which matters more than anyone expects it to until something goes wrong.
If you want the numbers rather than the argument, we published what it actually costs to build an app in Australia, including the ranges most agencies put behind a contact form.
We are in Richmond, in Melbourne. Plenty of the work we do is for clients who are not, and in practice very little of it depends on the postcode. Roadmaps are shared, progress is something you can open in a browser and click through rather than read about in a status report, and the calls happen inside your working day because we are in your timezone or within a couple of hours of it.
What we will not do is pretend distance never matters. Discovery workshops are better in person, and if you are interstate we would rather travel for that session than run it over a video call and lose half of what makes it useful. After that, remote delivery is genuinely normal and has been for years.
If you are in Melbourne, there are pages written specifically for that: custom software development in Melbourne and app development in Melbourne.
Custom web applications and platforms, internal systems and tools, marketplaces, and mobile apps for iOS and Android. The common thread is that an off-the-shelf product could not do the job, or could only do it if you bent your business around someone else's workflow. There is a fuller breakdown on what we do, and if you are still weighing the decision itself we wrote about custom software versus off-the-shelf.
Underneath, we build API-first, which means the data layer and the business logic are settled before anything is drawn on a screen. Get that right and the software stays simple to extend for years. Get it wrong and no amount of front-end work rescues it. We use Laravel for the API and Vue for the interface, and we have been on both long enough to know where they bite.
Some of what we take on is not a new build at all. If you have an AI-built prototype that stopped where the real work starts, that is a specific thing we do. Same for inheriting an existing codebase from another team, where the first deliverable is an honest assessment of what is worth keeping.
The code, the intellectual property, the servers, the repositories, the app store accounts. All of it is yours and all of it is set up in your name. We do not licence our work back to our clients and we do not sit on the keys as a retention strategy.
The test of that is what happens when you want to leave. If you build an in-house development team later, which several of our clients have, the job becomes handing everything over cleanly. That is a normal and reasonable end to a good engagement, not a failure of one.
If what you actually need is technical leadership rather than a build, we do that too, as a fractional CTO. We also published what a fractional CTO costs in Australia, for the same reason we published the build costs.
Strategy first. Before anything is scoped or priced we work out where the product is going and how it gets there. That produces a roadmap you can build against and fund against. It is described in more detail on technology strategy.
Then scoping. Strategy says what should exist. Scoping turns that into a plan with a number attached, which is the point at which a quote means something. We wrote about what technical scoping involves if you want to know what you are buying.
Then the build. Usually staged, so something real is in front of users early rather than a year from now. A first usable version is commonly around three months, and what moves that number is scope rather than effort. If you are shipping a first version, MVP builds is the page for you.
Then we are still here. The same team stays with the product after launch. That is the part that is hard to demonstrate on a website, so the honest version is to look at who we have worked with and for how long.
A focused first version from an Australian team generally runs from around $30,000 to $80,000. Systems with several user types, payments and integrations commonly land between $80,000 and $200,000. The range is wide because it follows how many things the software has to do, which is what strategy settles and scoping then prices.
The offshore hourly rate is lower. Whether the total is lower depends on how much of your own time goes into specifying, reviewing and correcting the work, and how much gets rebuilt later. Sometimes offshore is genuinely the right call and we will say so. The case for staying onshore is usually shared working hours, being able to sit in the same room when it matters, and having someone accountable under Australian law.
Yes. We are based in Richmond in Melbourne and work with clients around Australia. Most of the work happens the same way regardless of where you are: video calls, shared roadmaps and working software you can look at as it goes. Being in the same timezone matters more day to day than being in the same city.
Ask who will actually write the code and whether you will speak to them. Ask what happens if you want to leave, and whether you own the code, the IP and the infrastructure outright. Ask what they do before quoting, because anyone willing to price a build before understanding what it is for is guessing. Then check their references, ideally ones you found rather than ones you were given.
You do, completely. The code, the IP, the servers and the accounts are yours, set up in your name. We do not licence anything back to you, and if you later build an in-house team we help hand it over rather than holding onto it.