Service 02 / 03 · Laravel
When an off-the-shelf product has quietly run out of road, a custom Laravel build is often what picks the work up from there. I build bespoke web applications, internal admin tools and scheduling or operations platforms that fit how your team actually works, written so the developer who picks them up next can read what's going on and keep extending them without needing to start again.
onward
Laravel is genuinely the right call when the work has grown beyond what spreadsheets, vendor tools and bolt-on plugins can keep up with, and what you really need is something shaped properly around the way your business operates day to day. Here are three of the signals I tend to look for when this service is going to be a good fit.
Spreadsheets and SaaS are slowing you down.
Your team is quietly patching a process together across half a dozen different tools and a browser tab full of Google Sheets. It tends to work just fine, right up until the person who really understands it leaves.
You need an admin platform shaped around your operations.
Off-the-shelf tools have a habit of forcing your business into their model rather than yours. A custom Laravel platform flips that the right way around, working the way your team actually does.
Multiple systems need to talk to each other.
Your CRM, your ERP, the third-party APIs you depend on and your own data, all pulled together into one clean, versioned interface that your team and your integrations can both rely on.
Discovery
Build
Aftercare
Custom apps honestly don't fit into tidy boxes the way brochure sites do. The bands below are typical for the kind of work I tend to take on. Every project gets a written proposal with a real scope and a real number once we've actually had a proper conversation about what you need.
Focused MVP / internal tool
Typically 8 to 14 weeks.
A tightly scoped first release covering one core flow, one admin panel and one key integration. The point is to build something that's ready to grow.
Custom platform / admin product
Typically 3 to 6 months.
Multiple user roles, a richer data model, real-world integrations to think about, plus the training and rollout your team needs to actually adopt it.
Ongoing development
Retainers from two days a month.
Steady iteration, new features as they're needed, advisory time and code review. Fixed monthly hours that roll forward when you don't use them.
Utilita EnergyEnergy, Utilities2024 to ongoing
A maintenance and permits platform built to replace the spreadsheets and bloated enterprise tools the team had been using, giving them something practical, purpose-built around their work, and genuinely used by the engineers out in the field every day.
OnlineFMFacilities2024 to ongoing
A scheduling platform shaped properly around how facilities teams actually work day to day, with jobs, sites, engineers and assets all sitting together in one place, and an admin experience the team genuinely wants to log into rather than dread.
Honestly, most operations problems are best solved with a SaaS subscription, and that's usually my first recommendation when someone gets in touch. Laravel becomes the right answer when off-the-shelf tools are forcing your business to work against someone else's model, when the per-seat costs are starting to spiral out of control, or when nothing on the market actually fits the work you do.
All three, in the places they each fit. Filament is great for admin platforms where the team needs proper power and speed without us having to build a bespoke UI from scratch. Livewire is the right choice for the public-facing app where you want reactive interfaces without bringing in a separate JavaScript framework. And Inertia with Vue or React makes sense when the front-end genuinely justifies the extra weight. The choice gets made during discovery, in writing, with proper reasons behind it.
Most of the time, yes. Take-overs usually start with a short technical audit, where I dig through the code, the architecture, the dependencies, the deployment setup and any security concerns. From there I'll write up a remediation plan that's honest about what's worth salvaging and what really isn't, with options at a few different levels of investment so you can choose how to move forward.
For most builds I'd reach for Forge on DigitalOcean or Hetzner, with Vapor on AWS when you need to go serverless, or your own infrastructure when there's a regulatory or platform reason driving it. I'll handle the setup, the deploy pipeline, the monitoring and the backups, all documented properly so the team that owns it next isn't left guessing.
Yes, with PHPUnit or Pest depending on the project, and the level of coverage gets matched to where the real risk is. Critical flows, anything touching money, and the integrations all get tested properly. UI affordances and one-off admin pages get a lighter touch. I'll be open with you about where I'm drawing the line and why I've put it there.
Honestly, this is often the best way to work. Sitting alongside your developers as an extra pair of hands, leading the architecture decisions, doing code reviews on what they're shipping, or taking ownership of a particular slice of the work from start to finish. A lot of agencies and in-house teams already use me this way.
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