Hire a Dedicated PHP Developer — Laravel, SaaS Backends, and Legacy PHP Modernisation

Yes. PHP 8.x is a modern, strongly-typed language with competitive performance — PHP 8 benchmarks faster than Python 3 and on par with Node.js on CPU-bound tasks in controlled tests. Laravel is one of the most productive backend frameworks available in any language. The argument that PHP is legacy is a decade out of date; it confuses the PHP of shared hosting and unstructured scripts with the PHP of Laravel, Symfony, and proper object-oriented architecture. PHP powers Slack's backend, Etsy, and Wikipedia at significant scale.

Automely engages on a flat monthly retainer per dedicated PHP developer. Your developer is assigned 100% to your project — embedded in your Slack, your Git, and your sprint cycle. One-month minimum engagement, two-week pause/stop notice. NDA on day one. Full IP transfer to client. Code in your Git from day one. Retainer is custom-quoted in the strategy session based on developer seniority and project scope. No marketplace platform fees, no agency markups, no billing surprises.

Laravel and Symfony are the two dominant PHP frameworks. Laravel focuses on developer experience with sensible defaults and a large first-party ecosystem (Sanctum, Cashier, Horizon, Octane, Livewire) — making it ideal for SaaS products, REST APIs, and most commercial projects. Symfony focuses on flexibility and component reuse, making it preferred for very large enterprise applications and CMS systems. Our developers are senior in both and recommend the right framework for your specific use case during the strategy call.

Yes. Legacy PHP modernisation is one of our core specialisations. We start with a code audit covering security vulnerabilities, performance bottlenecks, dependency obsolescence, and architectural debt. We then propose a phased migration plan — often incremental Laravel adoption alongside the legacy code, retrofitted test coverage, and gradual replacement of fragile components. Most legacy modernisations achieve full migration within 4 to 9 months while keeping the application live throughout.

Standard onboarding is 7 business days from signed engagement. We use this week to review your codebase, set up access to your repository and infrastructure, sign NDA, and align on the first sprint. For urgent engagements we can compress this to 3 to 4 days. Your developer is contributing code within a week of engagement start.

Yes. Our developers write Laravel properly — Controllers that do one thing. Services for business logic. Repositories for data access. Form requests for validation. Eloquent models with proper relationships. Tests that actually run. We follow PSR-12 coding standards, SOLID principles, and clean architecture patterns. Code is reviewed by our CTO Amir Khan on every commit to ensure architecture quality stays at senior standard throughout the engagement.

Yes. Multi-tenant SaaS development is one of our most common PHP engagements. We build Laravel SaaS applications with subscription billing via Cashier and Stripe, multi-tenancy patterns (single-database with tenant scoping or database-per-tenant), feature flag systems, onboarding flows, admin dashboards, and high-performance infrastructure patterns using Laravel Octane and queue workers. We have shipped multiple production SaaS platforms on Laravel — including those with thousands of paying customers.

Yes. Full intellectual property and code ownership transfers to you on every engagement. Code lives in your Git from day one — not in an Automely-owned repository. No source code escrow, no licensing back to you, no ongoing platform fees. Your custom Laravel applications, APIs, and any bespoke functionality are 100% yours. The engagement can end any time with two weeks' notice. There is no lock-in.