The questions we get most often about services, pricing, process, and what working together actually looks like.
Studio 17 Designs is a Melbourne-based software studio. We build new SaaS products from scratch, rescue codebases built with AI coding tools, maintain live SaaS products under a monthly retainer, and build affordable custom web apps for Australian small businesses. We are not a graphic design agency, despite the word "Designs" in our name.
We are based in Melbourne, VIC, Australia. We work remotely with founders and small businesses across Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, and occasionally further afield when the project is a good fit.
SaaS Builds are full multi-tenant SaaS products designed to be sold to many customers, typically commissioned by a founder and costing AUD $25,000 to $80,000. Custom Apps for Your Business are single-tenant web apps built for one specific business to use internally or with its own customers — a clinic's intake portal, a tradie's job tracker, an accountant's document collection flow. Custom Apps are AUD $3,000 to $8,000 flat-fee to build, plus AUD $150 to $300 per month for hosting and ongoing support.
Australian-region hosting, uptime monitoring and alerting, automatic security patches and dependency updates, daily backups, a small allocation of changes and tweaks each month (typically two to four hours), and same-day response if anything is genuinely broken in production. You can cancel any time with a full handover of the source code, database, and infrastructure.
Our current focus is trades and home services (plumbers, electricians, builders, landscapers), healthcare and allied health (clinics, physios, psychologists), professional services (accountants, lawyers, consultants), and hospitality and retail (cafes, restaurants, small retailers, gyms). We will consider other industries — ask us.
Yes, outright. On day one we set up the GitHub repository under your account (or transfer it on launch), the database is yours, and you have full admin access to the hosting platform. If you ever leave us, the code, data, and infrastructure stay with you — we just hand over the keys.
A typical first-launch SaaS build takes four to eight weeks, depending on scope. We begin with a two-day discovery to define the data model, auth approach, and core flows, then deliver a written scope with a fixed price and timeline before any application code is written.
Vibe code rescue is our service for codebases built primarily with AI coding tools such as Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or ChatGPT. These products are often genuinely useful but become fragile under real usage. We stabilise the existing codebase, fix the most damaging bugs, add tests and CI/CD, and bring it up to production standards — without a full rewrite.
A rewrite throws the existing code away and starts again, typically taking months. A rescue keeps the working product live, identifies the highest-risk issues first (race conditions, security gaps, missing error handling), and remediates them in place. Most rescues take two to six weeks.
SaaS builds are fixed-price after the discovery call and typically range from AUD $25,000 to $80,000 depending on scope. Vibe code rescues are fixed-price after a two-week audit and range from AUD $10,000 to $40,000. Maintenance retainers start at AUD $4,000 per month. We share an exact written quote before any work begins.
A maintenance retainer covers bug fixes, dependency and security patches, monitoring and alerting, regular code health reviews, and a monthly allocation of new feature development. Same-day response for production-breaking issues; non-urgent work is batched into a monthly cycle.
Our default stack is Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase, PostgreSQL, Stripe, and Vercel, with Tailwind CSS for styling and Vitest for testing. We use GitHub Actions for CI/CD and Sentry for monitoring. We will use a different stack when the project calls for it.
Yes. We are happy to sign mutual non-disclosure agreements before any discovery work. Once an engagement starts, all client work is confidential by default.
You do. On project completion, all source code, infrastructure configuration, and documentation transfer to the client. We do not retain any rights or licences over delivered work.
Every project ships with a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline that runs tests on every pull request and deploys to a staging environment on merge to a release branch. Production deploys are gated by a manual approval or branch promotion. We default to Vercel for hosting but support AWS, GCP, and other clouds.
Yes. SaaS builds include a tenant-isolation strategy from day one (typically a tenant_id pattern with PostgreSQL row-level security), authentication wired through Supabase Auth or your provider of choice, and Stripe billing with webhook-driven seat provisioning.
A small number, usually one to three, so each project gets the attention it needs. If we are at capacity when you reach out, we will tell you up front and offer a start date instead of stretching ourselves thin.
Yes. The initial conversation to scope your problem is free. If we then proceed to a paid discovery, the cost is credited toward the project if you go ahead with us.
Send a message via the contact form or email [email protected]. Include a short description of what you are building or what is broken, and we reply within one business day to schedule a call.