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Bali Zero
Bali Zero handles visas, company setup, tax and property compliance in Indonesia. Ask us directly on WhatsApp.
Chat with Bali Zero on WhatsAppMost of this series is a tour of locked doors. This article is the rare exception: a corridor that is genuinely open. If your business is software, and you build it the right way under the right code, you can still register a foreign-owned company in Bali in 2026 while the villa, the café, and the consulting firm next door cannot.
But the corridor is narrow, and it has trapdoors. The difference between an IT code that passes the Bali moratorium and one that is silently blocked is not the kind of work you do — it is the risk class the OSS system assigns. Get the code right and you are in. Reach for the wrong "tech" code and you hit the same wall as everyone else.
The Bali block (Governor letter B.27.000/642/PM/DPMPTSP, effective 13 May 2026) freezes new PMA registration for any activity the OSS system rates low or medium-low risk. A PT PMA is, by law, a large-scale (Besar) business — so what matters is the risk class at the Besar scale. Serious software development, at large scale, lands in medium-high or high risk. That higher risk class is exactly what lets it through the filter. The moratorium was built to stop low-risk micro-businesses; substantial IT operations are the opposite of that.
Each of these is nationally TERBUKA (100% open) and, in the 2025 Bali classification, registrable — OK_or_HIGHER_RISK — because its large-scale risk class survives the moratorium:
For a foreign founder running a real software, SaaS, data, or cloud operation, this is a workable spine. 62199 and 62110 cover most "we write code" businesses; 62201/62202/62203 cover the security-and-trust niche; 63101/63102 cover data and hosting.
Here is where confident people fall. These codes sound like the future of tech, but the OSS system rates them in the low/medium-low band, so the Bali moratorium blocks them for PMA — even though all are nationally open:
The irony is sharp: a founder building an AI or blockchain company — exactly the kind of high-tech work you'd assume Bali would welcome — picks 62194 or 62193 and is refused, while a plainer "other computer programming" company on 62199 walks straight in. The label is glamorous; the risk class is what the gate reads.
Older guides will hand you IT numbers that no longer exist in KBLI 2025 at all — the 2020-era 62011 / 62019 / 63122 and similar were aggregated into the newer codes above. Registering against a retired number is a non-starter, the same dead-end as the phantom 74149 we bury in another article. Always confirm the code is a live 2025 code first, then confirm its Bali status second.
The IT escape route is real. It is also the most code-sensitive choice in this series: two activities that feel identical to the founder can sit on opposite sides of the wall. This is precisely the kind of decision to verify against ground-truth data, not a forum post.
Check the live Bali status of your exact IT code — 62199, 62110, 63101 and the rest — on the Bali Zero KBLI Navigator at balizero.com, so you build on a code that passes the moratorium instead of a blockchain or AI label that quietly doesn't.