A small custom-build outfit with a base in Melbourne, Victoria — not an agency, not an offshore team. We build around Xero, Shopify, Cin7 and the rest of what you already pay for.
Custom software development in Melbourne is a crowded market. Victoria has more agencies, studios and development shops than any state except New South Wales, and plenty are good at what they do. So the useful question is not whether someone can build you a system. It is which kind of outfit suits your problem.
Drawn AI is small on purpose. Liam and Jacob started it in 2024 after years of working around business systems that made ordinary work harder than it needed to be — Liam in retail operations management, Jacob in mining operations. One of us is based in Melbourne, Victoria and one in Queensland, and we work remotely with clients around the country. There is no office to visit. We would rather say that plainly than describe a building we do not have.
What Victoria's economy runs on shapes what we get asked to build here. The state is weighted towards retail and consumer businesses, professional services firms, logistics and distribution, manufacturing, healthcare and education. Those are operations businesses. They have volume and process, and most have a software stack bought one product at a time across fifteen years that never quite joined up.
Our approach to custom software development is to build around that stack rather than replace it. Xero or MYOB stays. Shopify, Cin7, Deputy, Employment Hero, HubSpot, SharePoint — they stay too, if they earn their licence fee. The work is in the joins, the gaps, and the parts of your operation no product was designed to handle.
Rostering, open and close checks, stocktakes, inter-store transfers, and price changes that reach every site at once. Liam ran retail operations before this, so systems for multi-site retail are ones we have lived inside rather than only read about.
Time recording, work in progress, utilisation, matter and job codes, engagement letters, and the billing run that costs a partner two evenings every month. Professional services firms usually own a practice management product already; the gap is everything either side of it.
Quote to order to pick to dispatch, carrying customer-specific pricing, backorders and freight through the whole path. Where trade customers still order by phone and email, a customer portal takes that reorder traffic off your sales desk.
One view of sales, margin, labour and stock across stores, warehouses and online, refreshed overnight instead of assembled by hand on a Monday. Most of this is custom dashboards built on data you already hold.
Pricing, allocations, commissions, demand forecasting — the workbook the business depends on, that one person genuinely understands. Replacing that spreadsheet with a proper system is the most common first project we take on, and the easiest to justify.
Buying the best product for each separate problem leaves you with the same data in six places and someone rekeying it every week. Connecting those systems is usually the cheapest useful thing we build.
A conversation about what is going wrong and what it is costing you. Because one of us is in Melbourne, spending a morning in a store, a warehouse or an office is straightforward when it will show us what a video call cannot.
We map the process the way it really runs, including the exceptions and the things that only happen at month end. This business process analysis usually shortens the build, because it shows what does not need building.
We build the smallest useful version first and put it in front of the people who will use it, early. You see working software during the build, not a demonstration at the end of it.
We connect it to your accounting, POS, payroll, e-commerce and inventory systems so information moves once. Removing the rekeying step is workflow automation, and it is where the hours come back. Client data we host sits in Australian regions.
Once it is in daily use, real behaviour shows what a specification could not. We keep refining it, and the subscription covers that continuing work rather than treating it as a variation.
We do not quote fixed-price projects or bill by the hour. Drawn AI works on a monthly subscription, minimum term three months, thirty days' notice to cancel. The figure depends on scope and how much continuing development you want. You get a monthly number before you commit to anything, and no variation invoice every time you ask for a change.
Agencies are built to run several projects at once, with account managers, producers and a bench of developers. That structure is genuinely useful at scale, and you pay for it. With us you talk to the people writing the code. The trade-off is capacity: we take on few clients at a time, so if you need five workstreams running by next month, an agency is the better choice.
Offshore rates are lower and some offshore teams are excellent. What you give up is overlap in working hours, shared context about how Australian businesses run, and someone who understands what a stocktake, a remittance or an EOFY close actually involves. For a system that has to fit your operation exactly, that context is most of the job. For well-specified, self-contained work, offshore can make sense.
Less than a replacement rollout, because we build alongside what you already run rather than switching it off. Expect a few hours in discovery, real time from whoever knows the process best during mapping, and testing from the people who will use it daily. Nothing gets retired until its replacement has been working in parallel long enough to trust.
No. We work remotely from bases in Melbourne, Victoria and Queensland, and we are not going to invent a shopfront. Meeting on your site is usually more useful anyway, and that is straightforward in metro Melbourne and regional Victoria. Most work — discovery, reviews, support — runs well over video. Email outreach@drawnai.app or use the contact page.
No. Melbourne and Victoria are where a lot of our work sits, but we work Australia-wide, remotely, including regional Victoria — Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo and further out. Distance rarely changes the build. It changes how often meeting in person is worth the travel, and we are upfront about when a trip earns its keep and when it does not.
A first conversation costs nothing and usually ends with a clearer idea of what is worth building — sometimes that answer is “not yet”, and we will say so.
No lock-in templates. Built around you.