Laravel development — for product teams and agencies worldwide

Laravel apps that handle real traffic, scale clean, and your ops team can actually run.

Custom Laravel development for business apps, multi-tenant SaaS, custom APIs, and admin-heavy products. We ship Laravel applications with p95 latency under 200 ms, 80%+ test coverage on critical paths, OWASP Top 10 hardened, and an admin panel your ops team can actually operate.

1,000+
Laravel apps shipped since 2015
10yrs
Building on Laravel
4.9
Across 1,000+ reviews
200ms
p95 API latency baseline · every build
The real cost

A slow, untested, or untuned Laravel app is a tax you pay every release.

Most product teams discover their Laravel app is hurting the business only after it has been in production for a year — p95 latency has crept up, the test suite has fallen behind, the queue worker keeps falling over at 3 AM, and nobody can explain why. The three observations below are what we say out loud on every Laravel discovery call.

01

Slow API endpoints compound downstream.

Every slow API endpoint slows down every frontend that calls it — the web app, the mobile app, the partner integration, the admin panel. A typical untuned Laravel endpoint fires 30 to 60 queries via N+1 problems and missing eager-loading; a properly tuned one fires 2 to 5. The user-facing impact is real: a SaaS dashboard that takes 3 seconds to load on every page transition is a SaaS product nobody wants to use. Most teams have no idea because they only watch the average and the average hides the slow tail.

02

An untested Laravel app is an unshippable Laravel app.

The cheapest engineering decision a Laravel team can make is to take test coverage seriously from week one. The most expensive engineering decision is to skip it because "we will add tests later." The team that has tests ships confidently every week. The team without tests slows down every sprint, rolls back deploys, and reads code paranoid about side effects. Test coverage above 80% on critical paths is not a vanity metric — it is the line between an application your team can ship on and one they cannot.

03

Without observability, your Laravel app is a haunted house.

Most Laravel apps we inherit have no production error tracking, no queue health monitoring, no slow-query logging, no APM. The team finds out about bugs when a customer complains and emails support. The team finds out about queue backlogs when emails stop sending. The team finds out about slow endpoints when the database server falls over. Sentry, Telescope in production with discipline, slow-query logs, Horizon dashboards, and a status page are the difference between an app the team can run for years and an app the team is afraid of.

What we build

Six kinds of Laravel build, each engineered to last a decade.

Custom Laravel applications

Business applications, B2B SaaS, internal tools, ops platforms. Laravel 11+ with PHP 8.3+, Eloquent ORM with proper eager-loading, queue-driven background work via Horizon, Filament for admin. Built so ops teams can operate without engineering.

Laravel APIs (REST & GraphQL)

JSON APIs for mobile apps, partner integrations, and decoupled frontends. Sanctum or Passport auth, API Resources for serialisation, rate limiting, versioning, OpenAPI/Swagger documentation, GraphQL via Lighthouse where it earns its complexity.

Multi-tenant SaaS

Single-database or multi-database multi-tenancy. Sub-domain or path-based tenant routing. Stripe Cashier for billing. Per-tenant feature flags, usage-based pricing, role-based access. We have shipped both architectures and recommend based on data isolation requirements.

Laravel + Inertia.js

Full-stack monolith with SPA UX. One repo, one deploy, Laravel + React (or Vue) bridged by Inertia. The right architecture for B2B SaaS, admin-heavy products, and small teams that need to ship without API duplication or auth complexity.

Admin panels (Filament, Nova)

Custom admin panels that ops teams genuinely use. Filament for most engagements (free, open-source, accessibility-tuned by us). Nova for paid customer-facing admin. Custom-built admin when the requirements outgrow both. CRUD generators, dashboards, role-based access, audit trails.

Performance audits & Octane

p95 latency under 200 ms, query count under 10 per endpoint, cache hit ratio above 80%. Laravel Octane migrations (Swoole, FrankenPHP) for 5 to 10x throughput on traffic-intensive APIs. Profiled production databases, slow-query elimination, queue tuning, infrastructure right-sizing.

Beyond the build

The work that keeps the Laravel app healthy after launch.

A Laravel app is healthy only as long as someone is paying attention to the queries, the queue, the security patches, and the infrastructure. We offer three engagement types alongside the build itself.

Laravel migrations & upgrades

Legacy Laravel (5.x, 6.x, 7.x) to current Laravel (11/12). Stays-passing-the-whole-time upgrade strategy: one major version at a time, tests passing at each step, no big-bang rewrites. Composer dependency upgrades, PHP version upgrades, framework convention updates where they help.

  • Laravel 5.x → 11.x (typical 4-10 weeks)
  • PHP 7 → PHP 8.3 with code modernisation
  • Deprecated patterns refactored where it pays
  • Tests passing at every step — no big-bang rewrites

Performance audits & ongoing engineering

Monthly retainers covering security patches, Laravel version updates, Composer dependency updates, database performance monitoring, queue health monitoring, error tracking with Sentry or Bugsnag, slow-query log review, backup verification, and a fixed allocation of engineering hours per month.

  • Security patches · weekly cadence
  • Slow-query log review · monthly
  • Queue and worker health monitoring
  • Allocated hours: bug fixes, small features, refactors

Security audits & compliance

OWASP Top 10 audits on every build (SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, SSRF, broken access control, etc.). PCI compliance preparation for payment-handling applications. SOC 2 control implementation. Dependency vulnerability scanning. Penetration test remediation. Compliance is part of the build, not a fix before launch.

  • OWASP Top 10 audit on every release
  • Dependency vulnerability scanning (composer audit)
  • PCI / SOC 2 control implementation
  • Pen-test remediation as a service
Backend & reliability scoreboard

The numbers every Laravel build we ship has to hit.

Every Laravel build is shipped against four hard targets. We measure, we tune, we re-measure. Below the line, the build is not done until each number is in the green.

01 — API latency & throughput

p95 under 200ms · p99 under 500ms · every endpoint

Measured continuously in production. p95 (95th percentile) is the metric that matters — median hides the slow tail, p99 is too noisy on low traffic. Healthy Laravel APIs hit p95 under 200 ms. Slow ones cross 1 second and stay there.

p50 42ms p95 88ms p99 186ms RPS 1.2k / sec Octane: 5-10x Eager-loaded · cached Queue: async work UNDER SLO · GREEN
02 — Test coverage

80%+ on critical paths · Pest / PHPUnit

Test coverage on critical paths (controllers, models, services, jobs) above 80%. Feature tests for API endpoints. Integration tests for queue workers. Coverage is not a vanity metric — it is the difference between a Laravel app the team can ship on confidently and one they cannot.

87% OVERALL CONTROLLERS 94% SERVICES 88% JOBS 82%
03 — Security & OWASP

OWASP Top 10 passing · dependencies clean

SQL injection, XSS, CSRF, SSRF, broken access control, security misconfiguration, vulnerable dependencies, identification and authentication failures — every Laravel build is audited against the OWASP Top 10 before launch. Composer audit runs on every CI build.

OWASP Top 10 · passing composer audit · 0 known vulnerabilities PCI / SOC 2 controls in place where required
04 — Observability & uptime

Sentry · Horizon · 99.9% uptime SLA

Production error tracking on every Laravel build — Sentry or Bugsnag. Queue health monitoring via Horizon. Slow-query log review monthly. Uptime monitoring with alerting. The team finds out about issues before customers do.

99.9 % uptime SLA MONITORED Sentry production errors ALERTING Horizon queue health DASHBOARD
How we work

Five steps from brief to a Laravel app your team can run for a decade.

The process below has stayed the same for ten years and 1,000+ Laravel builds. Every step is required. Skipping any one of them is how Laravel apps end up slow, untestable, or quietly insecure.

01

Brief and API spec

We learn the application domain, the team, the existing codebase if any, the integrations and third-party APIs, and the performance and security targets. We finish with a written brief, an API specification on paper, and a data model diagram.

02

Architecture and data modelling

Database schema design with proper normalisation and indexes. Eloquent model relationships planned. Service-layer boundaries decided. Queue strategy. Cache strategy. Auth strategy. Multi-tenancy approach if applicable. The architecture is decided before any feature work starts.

03

Custom Laravel build

Laravel 11+ with PHP 8.3+. Eloquent with eager-loading by default. Filament admin where ops teams need it. Inertia, Livewire, or decoupled API based on the architecture decision. Pest test suite alongside the code. Weekly demos, two-week sprints, preview deploys on every PR.

04

Security and load testing

OWASP Top 10 audit. Penetration test if required. Load testing against expected production traffic. Composer audit for vulnerable dependencies. Real-database testing of N+1 patterns. p95 latency tuning. Queue worker concurrency tuning. The team that will run the app uses it before launch.

05

Launch, monitor, maintain

Launch checklist. Sentry / Bugsnag error tracking live. Horizon queue dashboard. Slow-query logging enabled. Backup verification. Uptime monitoring with alerting. Monthly maintenance from day one. Quarterly security and performance reviews.

Selected work

Laravel apps we have shipped across APIs, multi-tenant SaaS, admin, real-time, subscriptions, and headless commerce.

Six Laravel applications from the last 24 months. Every one passes the backend scoreboard targets, hits WCAG 2.2 AA on admin interfaces, runs OWASP-clean, and a mid-level Laravel engineer can pick it up on day one.

Meridian API
p95: 88ms · 92% covered · OWASP ✓
SaaS API · Laravel + React
Stratos Tenancy
p95: 142ms · 89% covered · SOC 2
Multi-tenant SaaS · Laravel Plus
Frondhill Admin
p95: 65ms · 95% covered · AA
Filament admin · ops platform
Aurora Backend
p95: 110ms · WebSocket: 30ms
Real-time API · Laravel Echo + Reverb
Postbrew Subscriptions
p95: 145ms · Stripe webhooks: 99.97%
Subscription commerce · Cashier
Chayya Headless API
p95: 95ms · cached · 4 regions
Headless commerce API · Laravel + Hydrogen

Need a Laravel app that handles real traffic without breaking?

Send us a brief about the application, the team, and the integrations. We will come back with a free, honest plan — fixed scope, fixed targets, no slides.

Request a discovery call
Where it shows up

Four kinds of Laravel build, one engineering team behind them.

The same Laravel capability adapts to four very different surfaces. Visual language stays consistent; what changes is the architecture, the data model, the auth strategy, and the deployment target.

APIs & microservices

JSON APIs & GraphQL

Laravel APIs for mobile apps, partner integrations, decoupled frontends. Sanctum / Passport / OAuth. Rate limiting, versioning, OpenAPI documentation, GraphQL via Lighthouse when it earns its complexity.

Multi-tenant SaaS

SaaS platforms

Multi-tenant B2B SaaS with per-tenant data isolation, Stripe Cashier billing, role-based access, tenant-aware caching, and admin dashboards your customer-success team can use.

Custom admin panels

Filament & custom admin

Internal tools, ops platforms, agent-facing dashboards, customer-success admin. Filament for fast iteration; Nova for paid customer-facing; custom-built when the requirements outgrow both.

Inertia full-stack

Laravel + Inertia.js apps

Monolith SaaS applications with SPA UX. One repo, one deploy, Laravel underneath, React or Vue on top. The right architecture for small teams shipping B2B SaaS fast.

Client stories

Two Laravel engagements, and what changed for the businesses behind them.

Meridian API

B2B SaaS · Laravel API + React · 2023–2025
The situation

A Series-B analytics SaaS where the Laravel API was the bottleneck. p95 latency had crept from 200 ms to 1.4 seconds over 18 months of feature additions. The team blamed Laravel; we suspected the database. The previous engineering lead had no test coverage and had left the codebase a year before.

What we did

Started with a 5-day audit: profiled the production database, mapped the top 20 slow queries, identified N+1 hot spots across 47 controllers. Eliminated N+1s with eager-loading. Added 23 missing indexes. Migrated 6 high-traffic endpoints to Laravel Octane (Swoole). Introduced Pest test suite covering critical paths. Set up Sentry, Horizon, slow-query logging.

The outcome

p95 latency moved from 1.4 seconds to 88 ms. Database CPU dropped from 75% to 22% on the same traffic. Throughput on critical endpoints up 8x with Octane. Test coverage now 92% on controllers, 87% overall. The new engineering lead onboarded in week one and shipped a feature by week two.

More about Meridian API →

Stratos Tenancy

Multi-tenant SaaS · Laravel + Filament · 2024–2026
The situation

A growing B2B SaaS on a single-tenant Laravel architecture that could not onboard enterprise customers because data lived in one shared database. Enterprise prospects were churning during procurement due to data-isolation concerns. Sales had stalled at the seven-figure mark.

What we did

Designed and built a multi-database multi-tenancy architecture using Spatie's tenancy package as the foundation. Migrated existing customers to per-tenant databases with zero downtime. Tenant-aware routing via sub-domains. Tenant-aware caching, queue routing, and storage. Filament admin extended for tenant management. SOC 2 controls implemented during the build.

The outcome

Three enterprise customers signed within the first 60 days post-launch. SOC 2 audit passed in month three. Per-tenant performance equal to or better than the previous single-tenant architecture due to smaller per-database working sets. Zero data leakage incidents (independently audited).

More about Stratos →
For agencies & product teams

The Laravel engineering team behind the agency.

Roughly 35% of our Laravel work is built for other agencies, product studios, and consultancies — under their brand, against their clients' deadlines. Three partnership models, all NDA-protected, with senior Laravel engineers working in time zones overlapping the UK, EU, and US workday.

01 · Partnership model

White-label Laravel development

Your brand. Our engineers. We never appear in front of your client — all communication, deliverables, and code go out under your name. The standard model for agencies that win Laravel projects but do not want to hire in-house Laravel engineering.

  • NDA & sub-contract in place before any work begins
  • Code, design files, and deliverables shipped under your brand
  • Joint Slack / email channels with your team only
  • You stay client-facing; we stay implementation-facing
Used by: digital agencies, full-service shops, consultancies
02 · Partnership model

Agency-of-record & dedicated Laravel pod

A pod of senior Laravel engineers and a project lead working as your in-house Laravel capacity — full-time or fractional, month-to-month or annual. The choice when Laravel is core to your service mix and hiring in-house is slower or more expensive than partnering.

  • Dedicated pod: 2 to 6 engineers + lead, scaled to your roadmap
  • Direct integration into your project tools (Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Asana)
  • Monthly capacity commitment; retainer or rolling SoW
  • Code ownership transferred to your repos
Used by: full-service agencies, SaaS product teams
03 · Partnership model

Capacity overflow & sprint-by-sprint

When your in-house Laravel team is full and the next project cannot wait. Sprint-by-sprint engagement, no commitment beyond the current two-week sprint, ready to pick up scoped work within 5 to 7 business days from green-light.

  • Two-week minimum sprint, rolling renewal
  • Scoped fixed-price work — feature build, migration, performance pass
  • Fast spin-up: 5 to 7 business days from signed SoW
  • No long-term commitment; ramp up or down per sprint
Used by: agencies with seasonal Laravel demand spikes
NDA-protectedStandard NDA, sub-contract, and IP transfer in place before any work begins.
Time-zone overlapWorking hours overlap with UK mornings, EU workday, and US afternoons every business day.
Single point of contactNamed project lead on every engagement. No agency-side account churn.
Your repos, your codeCode ownership transfers cleanly. We work in your Git, your hosting, your tooling.
Already running an agency or product team? Explore our white-label terms Start a partner conversation
Why not

Cheap Laravel shops, generic PHP, and untested rapid builds vs Laravel done properly.

Three routes most product teams consider before they hire a real Laravel engineering team. Each makes sense for someone. None hold up under real traffic the way a properly built Laravel does.

Cheap Laravel shop
  • Tutorial-grade Laravel, no eager-loading, no caching
  • p95 over 1 second under modest traffic
  • Zero test coverage · every deploy is risky
  • No observability · bugs found by customers
  • Cheap up-front · expensive to inherit and fix
Generic PHP / no framework
  • Hand-rolled PHP with no conventions
  • Every team member writes patterns differently
  • Security blind spots compound
  • Hiring senior engineers is harder than for Laravel
  • By year two, often rewritten on Laravel anyway
Custom Laravel at Dream Steps
  • Laravel 11+ · PHP 8.3+ · modern conventions
  • p95 under 200ms · eager-loaded · cached
  • 80%+ test coverage · OWASP audited
  • Sentry + Horizon + slow-query logs · observability built-in
  • Architected so mid-level engineers can pick it up day one

Cheap Laravel is the most expensive Laravel.

The savings show up in month one. The cost shows up when the database falls over at 10x traffic, when the queue worker silently drops jobs, when nobody can debug the 2 AM incident because there is no error tracking, and when the rewrite finally happens 18 months later. Every cheap Laravel build we have inherited has cost the client more in rebuild than custom would have first time round.

Generic PHP without conventions is technical debt with extra steps.

PHP itself is fine. The problem is that without a framework like Laravel, every team makes the same architecture decisions differently, every new engineer onboards slowly, and security patterns drift across the codebase. Laravel's conventions over configuration are the cheapest engineering investment a team can make.

A custom Laravel build does more, scales further, and the team can ship on it.

It costs more up front because that is what it costs to architect a backend with proper testing, observability, and security from day one rather than retrofit them later. Three years in, the maths favours it on every axis we measure — engineering velocity, p95 latency, security posture, hire-ability, total cost of ownership.

— The honest read

Build the Laravel app that fits the team in three years.

Request a Laravel engagement
Common questions

Questions Laravel buyers actually ask.

Fourteen of the most common WordPress questions, answered straight. If yours is not below, send it and we will reply with a real answer — not a sales pitch.

Why choose Dream Steps for Laravel development?

We have shipped 1,000+ Laravel applications since 2015 across business apps, multi-tenant SaaS, custom APIs, admin systems, and Laravel + Inertia full-stack builds. Our 40-person team of senior Laravel engineers, designers, and project leads in Noida, India works in time zones overlapping the UK, EU, and US workday. We hold every Laravel build to four hard targets: p95 API latency under 200 ms, 80%+ test coverage on critical paths, OWASP Top 10 audit passing, and WCAG 2.2 AA on every admin interface. We do not white-label other agencies’ work and tell clients honestly when Laravel is not the right answer.

Can you white-label Laravel development for our agency?

Yes — roughly 35% of our Laravel work is built for other agencies and consultancies under NDA. Three partnership models: white-label (your brand, our engineers, fully invisible), agency-of-record (a dedicated Laravel pod working as your in-house capacity), and capacity overflow (sprint-by-sprint engagement when your in-house team is full). Code ownership transfers to your repos. Time zones overlap with the UK, EU, and US workday.

Where is your Laravel team based?

Our entire Laravel engineering team is based in Noida, India — 40 people in our iThum Tower B office, founded in 2015. We work with product teams and agencies across the UK, US, Ireland, Australia, the UAE, Germany, and the Netherlands. Working hours overlap with UK mornings (your 9 AM to noon), the full EU workday, and US afternoons (your 1 PM to 6 PM EST). For agency partners we run in their tooling — Slack, Jira, Linear, ClickUp, Asana — as standard.

Should I use Laravel or Node.js for my backend?

Laravel for business applications, admin-heavy SaaS, B2B products, and CRUD-shaped workloads where the team needs to ship fast and stay consistent. Node.js (Express, Fastify, Nest) for real-time applications, JavaScript-native stacks where frontend and backend share types, and workloads that benefit from non-blocking I/O. We build both and tell clients honestly which stack fits their application and their team.

How much does a custom Laravel build cost?

Custom Laravel builds range from small business applications through to multi-tenant SaaS platforms and complex API services. The right scope drivers are workflow complexity, number of user roles, third-party integrations, multi-tenancy requirements, and the team’s Laravel maturity. We scope every engagement against the specific brief and are honest about which features can wait until phase two.

How long does a custom Laravel build take?

A typical Laravel + Inertia SaaS application takes 10 to 16 weeks. A Laravel API for a separate frontend takes 8 to 12 weeks. A multi-tenant SaaS platform with billing and admin takes 14 to 20 weeks. Custom plugin / admin panel work adds 4 to 8 weeks depending on scope. We work in two-week sprints with weekly demos and a deployable staging environment from sprint one.

Will my Laravel app be fast?

Yes — every Laravel app we ship hits p95 API latency under 200 ms on real production traffic, query count under 10 per request on read endpoints, cache hit ratio above 80% on cacheable endpoints, and memory per request under 32 MB on traditional PHP-FPM. We achieve this through proper eager-loading, database indexing, Redis caching, queue offloading, optimised Eloquent patterns, and Laravel Octane where the workload justifies it. Performance is part of the build, not an afterthought.

Do you build with Inertia.js, Livewire, or decoupled API + React?

All three, depending on what fits. Inertia.js for B2B SaaS and admin-heavy applications where one web frontend is the whole product — one repo, one deploy, SPA UX. Livewire for admin and back-office where the team is fully PHP-native and wants minimal JavaScript. Decoupled Laravel API + React (Vite or Next.js) when there is a mobile app, a partner API, or specialised frontend / backend teams. We will tell you on the discovery call which architecture fits your case.

Can you build accessible Laravel admin and SaaS apps (WCAG 2.2 AA)?

Yes. WCAG 2.2 AA is our baseline on every Laravel application’s frontend — colour contrast checked per token, full keyboard navigation, screen-reader landmarks audited, form labels reviewed, focus management on modals. We use Filament with accessibility customisations for admin panels (Filament’s defaults are good but we tighten them) and Radix / React Aria primitives for Inertia React frontends. Accessibility is part of the build, not a fix after launch.

Can you handle Laravel Octane and high-traffic scaling?

Yes. Laravel Octane runs your app as a long-lived process (Swoole, Open Swoole, or FrankenPHP) for 5 to 10x throughput on simple endpoints. We have shipped Octane production deployments across SaaS, e-commerce, and high-traffic APIs. Octane requires careful state-leak auditing — singletons, static properties, in-memory caches need to be properly scoped — and we follow a deployment checklist on every Octane release. For low-traffic admin tools the traditional PHP-FPM model is simpler and fine.

Will you maintain the Laravel app after launch?

Yes. We offer monthly Laravel maintenance retainers covering security patches, Laravel version upgrades (point releases monthly, major releases quarterly), composer dependency updates, database performance monitoring, queue health monitoring, error tracking (Sentry, Bugsnag), backup verification, and a fixed allocation of editorial and engineering hours per month. For teams without a dedicated Laravel engineer in-house, this is how the app stays healthy past month one.

Can you migrate my legacy Laravel app to the current version?

Yes. Laravel upgrades (e.g. 5.x → 10/11/12) are typical 4 to 10 week engagements depending on the app size and how far behind the current version it is. The process: audit the codebase for deprecated patterns, upgrade the framework one major version at a time with tests passing at each step, update third-party packages, refactor controllers and Eloquent models for new patterns where helpful, deploy to staging for UAT, then production. We have done many of these and rarely have to break compatibility for long.

Can you handle multi-tenant SaaS architectures on Laravel?

Yes. Single-database multi-tenancy (tenant_id column on every model, scoped queries) for most B2B SaaS — fastest to build, easiest to maintain. Multi-database multi-tenancy (one database per tenant, switched at request time) for enterprise customers who need data isolation. Sub-domain or path-based tenant routing. Stripe Cashier for billing. Spatie’s tenancy package for the framework around it. We have shipped both architectures and will recommend the right one for your customer profile and compliance requirements.

What stack do you ship for a typical Laravel SaaS?

Our default 2026 Laravel SaaS stack: Laravel 11 with PHP 8.3+, PostgreSQL or MySQL with proper indexing, Redis for cache + queue + session + broadcast, Laravel Horizon for queue monitoring, Laravel Telescope for development debugging, Sentry for production error tracking, Pest for tests, Filament for the admin panel, Inertia.js with React + TypeScript + Tailwind for the customer-facing SaaS, Laravel Cashier (Stripe) for billing, deployed to Laravel Forge or Vapor. We adjust based on the team and requirements but the stack above is what we recommend by default.

Ready when you are

Build a Laravel app your team can run for a decade.

Tell us about the application, the team, the integrations, and the traffic shape. We will come back with a written brief, a realistic build cost, and a clear set of performance, security, and test-coverage targets we will hold ourselves to.

What to expect

A 30-minute conversation about your business, the editorial team that will run the site, and where you want to be in three years. No slide deck, no pitch.

You walk away with

A written brief naming the build scope, the performance and accessibility targets we will hold to, the timeline, and a realistic build cost.