Laravel Development

When a website stops being a website and starts being a tool – the thing your team logs into every morning, the thing that takes the payments, runs the memberships, moves the data – that’s when we reach for Laravel.

We’ve been building bespoke web applications for 19 years (as 18a, our Technical Director Tom has been doing it for longer), since before Laravel existed, which means we didn’t just learn the framework – we understand the problems it was invented to solve. We use it for our larger, more complex builds: systems integrating with third-party APIs and services, subscription platforms running recurring payments through Stripe and Laravel Cashier, and the kind of “websites, but tools” that run entire organisations.

Why Laravel?

We’ve been building with Laravel itself for around a decade – and with MVP PHP frameworks since long before that (CodeIgniter veterans, if you know, you know). 

Laravel is a PHP framework (a framework is basically a well-organised toolkit and set of conventions for building web applications, so developers aren’t reinventing the wheel every project). It’s hugely popular, which matters more than you might think – popular means well-maintained, well-documented, and easy to find developers for. Nobody gets locked in to us. If you ever wanted another developer to take over a Laravel application we’d built, they could open it up and understand the lay of the land quickly, because we build to Laravel’s conventions rather than our own private cleverness.

It also keeps how a system LOOKS very separate from how it WORKS. So a few years down the line you can have a complete cosmetic overhaul without anyone tinkering with the machinery underneath – which saves a genuinely surprising amount of money over a system’s lifetime.

And on security: Laravel gives you an enterprise-grade foundation out of the box. We build carefully on top of that, because most security problems aren’t framework problems — they’re developer-shortcut problems, and we don’t take those.

Experience, multiplied

AI tooling has changed what a small senior team can build – or rather, how quickly we can build it. We’ve always been quick, but now we’re turbo-charged! And seeing’s we charge by the hour/day, that means your money goes a lot further than it used to.

We use Claude Code in our Laravel development every day. What that means for you isn’t “AI wrote your system” – it’s that our 19 years of experience and attention to detail now moves at a speed that used to need a much bigger budget. The judgement is ours: the architecture decisions, the “should this even be built?” conversations, the security review, the taste. The typing is faster.

The practical upshot: builds that would have been out of reach for a mid-sized budget two years ago are now absolutely on the table. If you got a quote for a bespoke system in 2023 and winced, it’s worth asking again.

What we build with Laravel

• Bespoke systems and tools – CRMs, booking platforms, quoting engines, member databases, internal tools that replace the spreadsheet held together with hope. If your business runs on a process, we can build the tool that runs the process.
• SaaS products – from MVP to scale.
• Membership platforms – joining flows, renewals, recurring payments, CRM integrations.
• API integrations – Stripe, PayPal, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zoho, Mailchimp, SAP Business One and plenty besides. If it has an API, we can probably talk to it. If it doesn’t, we’ve usually found another way.

Inherited Laravel applications

We inherit a lot of systems. Maybe your developer was a freelancer who’s moved on. Maybe the agency that built it has drifted away from bespoke work. Maybe the relationship just ran out of road. Either way, you’re left holding a business-critical application that nobody wants to touch – and plenty of agencies will only quote you for a rebuild.

We’re more pragmatic than that. We’ll audit what you’ve got, tell you honestly what state it’s in (sometimes the news is better than you fear, sometimes it isn’t – either way you’ll get it straight), and then we’ll take over the care of it. Upgrades, security patching, new features, performance work. We can help it limp along until you’re ready for something new, or invest in it properly and make it what it always should have been.

Hosting that matches the build

If you’re having a Laravel application built, there’s a fair chance you’re expecting real traffic, or handling data that matters, or both. We design the hosting architecture alongside the build – load-balanced, auto-scaling, self-healing setups on AWS or DigitalOcean where that’s warranted, something simpler where it isn’t. And we monitor everything through SiteVitals, our own monitoring platform, so we usually know about a problem before you do.

There’s more on all of this on our architecture and hosting page.

The technical bit (for those who speak it)

PHP 8.x, Laravel with sensible use of the first-party ecosystem (Cashier for subscription billing, queues and Horizon for background work, scheduled tasks for the boring-but-vital stuff). Frontends in Blade with Alpine.js or ReactJS where the UX demands it. Version-controlled via Git with proper multi-environment deployment – local, staging, production – so nothing gets “fixed live”. Automated backups, error monitoring, and infrastructure as boring and predictable as we can make it, because boring infrastructure is the kind that stays up.

Why us and not a Laravel Partner agency?

There are some good official Laravel Partner agencies in the UK, and if you want a 40-person team, one of them might suit you.

What you get with us instead: directors who’ve been building for the web since before Laravel existed, doing the work themselves, at a size where your project is never the small one that gets the junior team. You get honest trade-off conversations – including “you don’t need bespoke for this bit” or “if we do it like this instead of what you said, you’ll get the same outcome but it’ll cost less”. And you get a team that will still be here in ten years, because we’ve already been here for nineteen.

Tell us what you need

Tell us what you’re trying to build – or what you’ve inherited – in whatever detail you’ve got. It’s fine if it’s one sentence and a worry. A director will come back to you as soon as possible with an honest first take, including whether Laravel is even the right answer. Get in touch >