Introducing Tern: a better way to apply for Australian visas

Every new visa platform has to answer the same question: why should you trust it with the most important paperwork of your life? It is a fair question. I would ask it too, and I am the one who built this.

I cannot answer it for you. What I can do is set out the rules about who is allowed to help with an Australian visa, show you where the platforms you find in a search sit inside those rules, and say plainly where Tern sits. Most of it is checkable. The checking is the point.

If what you are actually weighing up is doing it yourself against paying a migration agent, that is a different question. This post is about whether a platform deserves your trust in the first place.

Can you trust an online visa platform with an Australian visa?

It depends almost entirely on where the platform operates from. Under section 276 of the Migration Act 1958, only Registered Migration Agents and Australian-admitted lawyers can give immigration assistance for an Australian visa. A platform run from outside Australia cannot do that legally, and no Australian regulator can make it answer for what it does.

Before we get to that, the two routes you already know about, briefly.

Doing it yourself is the cheapest route and the riskiest one. You pay only the government fee, and nobody looks at the file before the Department does.

A migration agent or immigration lawyer is licensed, regulated and expensive: about $1,000 to $2,500 for a visitor visa, $1,000 to $2,000 for a student visa, $1,000 to $5,000 or more for a skilled visa, and $4,000 to $10,000 for a partner visa, checked mid-2026. Most firms publish nothing at all, so a published price list is not a reliable guide to what you will actually be quoted.

Which of those two fits you is a genuine decision. What matters here is the third option.

One thing to say first, because it cuts against the easy conclusion. A professional price does not guarantee a consistent process. Two practices charging the same fee can put very different amounts of work into a file, and because so few of them publish anything about how they work, you often find out which one you hired after you have paid. That variance in what professional money actually buys is part of why people go looking for a third option at all.

Why are offshore visa platforms a problem for Australian visas?

Offshore visa platforms operate outside Australian jurisdiction, so they cannot legally give immigration advice for an Australian visa and Australian authorities do not regulate them.

That rule exists to protect you. It makes sure the people giving visa advice actually know what they are doing, and that someone can be held accountable when they get it wrong. What you can check is whether a named person on an Australian register stands behind the advice. Offshore platforms are companies, and no Australian register lists them. If something goes wrong, the business you would be pursuing sits outside Australia, where Australian regulators and Australian courts have little practical reach.

Tern is on the other side of both of those. We are an Australian company, so Australian Consumer Law applies to us. The advice comes from a named immigration lawyer on a public Australian register who answers to his law society.

What does this mean in practice?

These platforms cannot legally give you immigration advice. They can help you fill in forms. They can take your payment and submit your application. But they cannot tell you which visa is right for your situation, whether your evidence is enough, or how to deal with a problem in your history. Doing that is immigration assistance, and they are not licensed for it.

Some operate in a grey area, providing what looks like advice while technically staying outside the legal definition. Others simply do not care about Australian regulation, because Australian authorities cannot reach them.

The one-size-fits-all problem

Beyond the legal limits there is a practical one. Most of these platforms put every applicant on the same visa subclass and stream, whatever their situation. Planning a short holiday, a long family visit or a business trip? You will likely end up on the same path.

They also pre-fill or skip questions. Criminal history is rarely asked about directly; the platform assumes you do not have one and moves on. Health conditions, previous refusals, time spent in certain countries: these get glossed over or defaulted to the easy answer.

That works fine when the assumptions happen to match your life. When they do not, you end up with the wrong visa or an application that contains inaccurate information. The wrong visa wastes your money and your time. Inaccurate information can lead to a refusal or, worse, an allegation that you gave false information, which can follow you for years. Our guide to PIC 4020 covers how seriously the Department takes that.

Does this matter if you just want your visa?

Sometimes it does not. If you are a US citizen applying for an ETA to spend two weeks in Melbourne, these platforms can process that fine. You would probably be approved whoever submitted it.

It matters when things get complicated: when you are from a country that gets extra scrutiny, when your circumstances need explaining, or when you need to know whether you are even applying for the right subclass. That is exactly when a platform that cannot legally advise you goes quiet.

What do reviews of offshore platforms tell us?

These platforms are not scams. They process visas successfully for plenty of people, and many customers have a good experience.

But read the reviews carefully. The major offshore visa expediting platforms all carry a meaningful share of one-star reviews on Trustpilot, and the complaint themes are consistent: poor support, delays, and no help when an application hits a problem.

When everything goes smoothly, they work. When something goes wrong, customers find themselves without meaningful support, unable to get answers, and without anyone qualified to tell them what happened or what to do next.

How is Tern different from other visa platforms?

Tern is the only Australian-based digital visa platform whose rules are set by an admitted Australian immigration lawyer. That shows up in four places.

We're based in Australia. That is more than a line on a marketing page. We operate under Australian migration law, sit within the Department's jurisdiction, and answer to Australian regulators. When the platform tells you something, it is because a qualified person is behind it.

Every rule is written by an immigration lawyer. Under the hood, a rules engine puts Australian migration law into code. An admitted Australian immigration lawyer sets the rules for eligibility, evidence and visa selection, so the guidance you get traces back to a real practitioner who stands behind it. What we do not automate is professional judgement. The platform delivers a lawyer's rules. It does not replace the lawyer who wrote them.

A lawyer reviews the applications where the stakes justify it. An immigration lawyer reviews every partner visa application before we submit it. Visitor, eVisitor, transit and working holiday applications are reviewed for errors and inconsistencies before submission, but not necessarily by a lawyer, and anything complex is escalated to the lawyer. We are careful with that distinction, because claiming lawyer review where it does not happen would be an easy sentence to write and a dishonest one.

The technology handles what technology is good at. Reading data out of your documents, cross-checking your answers against each other, testing the application against the lawyer's rules, and flagging problems while they are still fixable. You get that as you go, rather than waiting days for someone to come back to you.

Is Tern Visa legit?

Yes. Tern is an Australian company, incorporated and operating in Australia, and the immigration advice the platform gives is authored by an admitted Australian immigration lawyer. There is no offshore structure and no regulatory grey area.

You do not have to take my word for any of that, and you should not have to. Ask us who the lawyer is and we will tell you. Every Australian lawyer is on a public register held by the admitting authority in their state, so you can check the name we give you against it in about a minute. Do the same with any migration agent you are considering: every Registered Migration Agent has a registration number listed on the public OMARA register.

What being Australian-based means for you

We are not the cheapest way to get an Australian visa. Doing it yourself is, and for some people that is the right call. We cost less than a full-service migration practice because the collecting, checking and form-filling is done by software instead of billed by the hour, which leaves the lawyer's time for the part that actually needs a lawyer.

Who should use Tern?

Tern is a good fit if:

You might not need Tern if:

What is Tern building toward?

Full coverage of the Australian visa system, one category at a time. We started with visitor visas because they are the most common way into it, and partner visas followed because that is where the money and the anxiety both sit.

We are not there yet. Building this properly, with real legal oversight instead of shortcuts, takes longer than building a form. Every category we add follows the same model: software carries the administrative load, an immigration lawyer writes the rules, and the whole thing operates inside Australian law.

For a lot of people a visa decides whether they reunite with family, finish a degree, take a job, or start the next part of their life. The outcome should not depend on whether you happened to know the right things, or could afford to pay someone who did.

Ready to get started?

If you are applying for an Australian visa, we can help. The platform checks your eligibility, tells you which visa fits your situation, guides you through the evidence, and checks the application for problems before we submit it.

Not sure you need paid help at all? Do I need a migration agent? works through that question first.