Custom software development in Australia, from people who run an Australian business.

Onsite

When it is worth flying.

Onsite time is worth paying for when the process you are asking us to encode lives on a floor rather than in a document. Watching a pick, a pack or a print run for two days tells you things nobody thinks to say in a workshop — which step everybody skips, which screen has a sticky note over it, which report is printed and then ignored. That is the difference between software that gets used and software that gets worked around.

It is not worth paying for as reassurance. A weekly presence in your office is an expensive way to buy comfort, and it is the first thing an agency offers when it wants to justify a larger number. We will say during scoping whether we think onsite time is needed and roughly how much, and if the answer is none we will say that too.

If a project genuinely requires somebody on your floor for weeks at a time, we are the wrong firm and we will tell you at the start rather than after you have signed.

Privacy and data

Australian privacy obligations, in plain terms.

Who the Privacy Act applies to

The Privacy Act 1988 and its thirteen Australian Privacy Principles apply to most organisations above the small-business turnover threshold, and to some regardless of size — health service providers, and any business that trades in personal information among them. The threshold itself has been a live question in the reform program, so the safe assumption for a growing business is that you will be covered, if you are not already.

Collection and retention

The principle that most changes how a system gets built is that you should only collect personal information you actually need, and should destroy or de-identify it when you no longer need it. Most systems we are asked to replace do the opposite by default: they keep everything forever because storage is cheap and nobody wrote down a retention rule. That is a liability sitting on a disk. We would rather ask what the retention period is at design time than build the deletion job after a breach.

Notifiable data breaches

If a breach is likely to cause serious harm, you have to notify the Information Commissioner and the affected individuals. Meeting that obligation depends entirely on whether your systems can tell you what was accessed and by whom. That is an architecture decision made months earlier: audit logging that is append-only, access that is attributable to a person rather than a shared login, and a data inventory that says where personal information actually lives.

Sending data overseas

There is no blanket requirement to keep Australian personal information in Australia, but if you disclose it to an overseas recipient you generally remain accountable for how that recipient handles it. In practice that means the SaaS tools in your stack are your problem, not just your vendor’s. We default to Australian hosting regions and keep a written list of every third party that receives personal data, because that list is the first thing anyone asks for and the last thing anyone has.

R&D Tax Incentive

Keep the records while the work happens.

The R&D Tax Incentive is a real program and software work sometimes qualifies for it. Registration goes through AusIndustry and the claim goes through your tax agent, with a deadline measured from the end of your income year — which is why so many claims are assembled in a panic from git history and half-remembered decisions.

The eligibility test is narrower than most people assume. It is not “was this hard”. It is whether the outcome could have been known in advance by a competent professional in the field, and whether it was resolved by a systematic progression of work — hypothesis, experiment, observation, conclusion. Building a well-understood integration is not research, however much effort it takes. Establishing whether an approach can hold a required throughput when nobody knows the answer might be.

We are not R&D tax advisers and we do not tell you what to claim. What we do is keep contemporaneous records where the work happens: what we did not know at the start, what we tried, what the results were, and what we concluded. If your adviser decides an activity is eligible, the evidence already exists. If they decide it is not, you have lost nothing but a few paragraphs in a decision log you should be keeping anyway.

Fit

Who this is for.

Australian ecommerce and operations businesses roughly between one and fifty million in revenue, where the software problem is operational rather than cosmetic: orders that stall between systems, a stock position nobody trusts, a person capable of much more spending ten hours a week rebuilding a spreadsheet that is stale by Thursday.

It is not for you if you want a development team to work through a backlog you have already written, or a large firm with a bench and an account manager. There are good ones, and at some sizes that is the correct purchase. We are two people who take a small number of engagements, which is a real constraint and worth knowing before the first call rather than after it.

Work starts with a paid diagnostic that sets a baseline before anyone commits to a build, because a project that starts without one can never demonstrate afterwards that it changed anything. The engagement shapes and prices are on the services page, and the one case study we publish, including the figures we are withholding, is here.

Questions

The practical ones.

Where are you based?

Blue Monk Pty Ltd is an Australian company based in Cheltenham, in south-east Melbourne. We work with clients nationally and hold overlapping hours with the US and Europe for the ones who are not here.

Do you travel onsite?

Yes, when the work needs it — usually at the start of a build where the process lives on a floor rather than in a document, and occasionally at cutover. We will tell you during scoping whether we think onsite time is necessary and roughly how much, rather than discovering it after you have signed. Most of the delivery is asynchronous either way.

Where is our data stored?

By default in Australia — the Sydney region on the platforms we use, unless there is a specific reason to do otherwise, in which case we raise it before it happens rather than after. You own the data and the code from day one, and it runs on standard infrastructure any competent developer can pick up.

Does custom software qualify for the R&D Tax Incentive?

Some of it can. The test is not whether the work was difficult but whether the outcome was genuinely uncertain to a competent professional and was resolved by systematic experimentation. Routine development, configuration and integration work generally does not qualify; a novel algorithm or a genuinely uncertain technical approach might. We are not R&D tax advisers, so we do not make the call — we keep records your adviser can actually use.

Do we own the code?

Yes, and it is in the agreement rather than something you negotiate on the way out. The systems run on Shopify, Supabase and standard infrastructure, so your next developer will recognise what they are looking at. We are two people; making sure you could leave is the sensible response to that.

What does an engagement cost?

Engagements start with a paid operations diagnostic at A$5,000 to A$8,000 over two to three weeks. Fixed-scope builds run A$25,000 to A$60,000 over six to twelve weeks. Ongoing work is A$2,000 to A$8,000 a month on thirty days' notice. Fixed-scope work is quoted as a number before we start.