A small studio, built for direct work.
No account managers, no hand-offs — just the people building your software.
Basestate was founded in 2017 by Jacob Feiler, a full-stack developer with over a decade leading enterprise mobile and web application teams across non-profit organisations, startups and established companies. He started the company to build software the way it should be built: direct accountability, close client relationships, and no layers of account management between the person deciding and the person building.
Today Basestate is run by Jacob and his wife, who leads the studio's communications and operations, with trusted contractors brought in as needed for larger engagements. It's a small team by design — fewer handoffs, faster decisions, and someone who genuinely understands your system on the other end of every email.
Our approach favours pragmatism over ceremony: the right technology for the problem in front of us, not the trend of the year. That's led to long-running relationships, with engagements that evolve over years as a client's business does.
Beyond client work, we also contribute development time to non-profit and community organisations — technical work at a scale most consultancies never get exposure to.
Born in Melbourne, Australia, Basestate has worked as a distributed team from day one — collaborating with clients wherever they are.
Three things that don't change
Direct access
You talk to the person writing the code and making the decisions — not an account manager relaying messages.
Pragmatic engineering
We choose technology for the problem at hand, weighing maintainability and cost against what's fashionable.
Long-term thinking
Software is a relationship, not a handover. We build things we're still comfortable supporting years later.