Appsierra is a Laravel development company that builds new PHP applications and takes over existing ones. Our senior-led pods work across Eloquent, Blade, Livewire, queues and Laravel's API stack — shipping new builds, migrating legacy CodeIgniter or raw PHP codebases to Laravel, and running PHP 8.x and Laravel version upgrades without freezing your product roadmap.
The same four stages whether the repository is empty or already carries eight years of production PHP.
For a new build we start from your domain model and data. For an existing PHP application we read the code first — Laravel and PHP versions, package debt, test coverage, and the custom conventions previous teams layered on top of the framework.
You get a written plan before anyone writes code: the Eloquent data model, queue and cache boundaries, API surface, and — where the app already exists — the exact upgrade or migration order, with the riskiest change scheduled where it can be reverted safely.
Work ships in thin, releasable slices rather than one long branch. Each slice arrives with Pest or PHPUnit coverage and a senior review, so the codebase stays deployable and you can see progress in your own staging environment every week.
We ship through Forge, Vapor or your existing pipeline, wire Horizon and Telescope so queue and request behaviour is visible, and document the conventions we followed — so your team, or the next one, can pick the codebase up without an archaeology phase.
PHP still runs a very large share of the web, and Laravel is where most serious modern PHP now lives. That means the typical brief is rarely a clean sheet. It is a working application with real customers, an unknown upgrade path, and a team that has already moved on — a very different problem from choosing a stack for a new product, which is where our broader software development services start.
Laravel rewards teams who work with its conventions and punishes teams who work around them. Eloquent makes data access effortless right up to the point where an unnoticed N+1 query turns a dashboard into a timeout. Blade, Livewire and Inertia each solve a different interface problem, and choosing the wrong one costs months. Queues, events and jobs are simple to add and easy to leave unmonitored. A specialist is not buying you framework trivia — it is buying you the judgement calls that are cheap now and expensive in eighteen months.
The common brief is not "build me a Laravel app" — it is "this PHP application already runs the business and the team that wrote it has gone." Reading unfamiliar code safely is a different skill from starting a clean project, and it is the one that decides the outcome.
Laravel ships strong conventions for routing, Eloquent, validation and jobs. Teams under deadline pressure route around them, and the result is a private framework hidden inside the public one. Untangling that drift is most of the effort in a real Laravel engagement.
Laravel ships a major release roughly once a year, with bug fixes for about eighteen months and security fixes for around two years per release. PHP releases follow their own two-year security clock. Skipping either turns a routine upgrade into a rewrite.
Legacy PHP applications tend to carry schemas shaped by a decade of urgent changes — missing constraints, duplicated lookup tables, columns that mean two things. Eloquent will happily model all of it, so migration work is as much data design as framework work.
Framework depth, not a list of buzzwords — these are the parts of Laravel that decide whether an application ages well.
Relationships, scopes, casts, observers and eager-loading discipline — with versioned migrations and seeders, so schema changes are reviewable and repeatable across environments instead of applied by hand in production.
Server-rendered Blade where simplicity wins, Livewire where you want interactivity without a separate front-end build, and Inertia with Vue or React where the interface genuinely needs a single-page application. We pick per screen, not per fashion.
Long-running work — imports, exports, PDF generation, third-party calls, notifications — moves off the request cycle into queued jobs with retries, backoff and failure handling, monitored through Horizon so a stuck queue is visible before your customers find it.
Versioned REST and GraphQL endpoints with resources, form requests and policy-based authorization, secured with Sanctum for first-party clients or Passport for full OAuth2 — and covered by API testing services before anything integrates against them.
Feature tests through the HTTP layer, unit tests around domain logic, database factories instead of fixtures, and HTTP fakes for third-party calls. On takeover work, characterization tests come first so a refactor cannot quietly change behaviour.
Query profiling and N+1 elimination, Redis caching and cache tags, indexed schemas, and — where the workload justifies it — Laravel Octane for long-lived workers. We measure before optimising rather than reaching for Octane by reflex.
New builds and inherited codebases are both first-class engagements, and both start with the same audit.
Internal platforms, customer portals, booking and workflow systems built as tailored custom software on Laravel, where the business logic is specific enough that an off-the-shelf product would need more configuration than code.
Laravel as the API tier behind a mobile app, a JavaScript front end or a partner integration — with versioning, rate limiting, webhook delivery, idempotency and documented contracts that survive more than one consumer.
Tenancy strategy chosen deliberately — single database with scoping, or database-per-tenant — plus subscription billing through Cashier, plan and seat logic, tenant-aware queues, and the migration tooling to change a schema across every tenant safely.
Filament or Nova admin surfaces built over the same Eloquent models as the application, so operations teams get real tooling — bulk actions, exports, audit trails and permissions — instead of engineers running database queries on request.
Catalogue, cart, checkout, payment and fulfilment logic in Laravel, either standalone or as the commerce brain behind a storefront — complementing our wider e-commerce development practice.
Inheriting a live Laravel or PHP application whose original team has moved on: stabilise, document, get it back on a supported version, then resume feature work under our software maintenance and support model.
Most of the PHP estates we are asked to rescue were not built badly — they were built years ago, by people solving the problem in front of them, on a framework that has since stopped being maintained. CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, an old Symfony release, or plain procedural PHP with the business rules living inside page templates: the pattern is the same, and so is the risk. Rewriting from zero looks decisive and usually stalls, because the specification everybody assumes exists turns out to be the running code.
We migrate incrementally instead. Laravel sits in front of the legacy application, and functionality moves across one route at a time while both systems share a database and a session. That keeps the business running through the transition, keeps every release reversible, and — critically — lets you stop and reassess at any point without being stranded halfway through a rewrite. For teams who want the same migration delivered from a dedicated offshore pod, our offshore software development model applies the identical process at a lower run-rate.
Legacy PHP applications rarely have accurate specifications. We read the routes, cron jobs, database triggers and the dead code nobody dares delete, and produce a behaviour map — because you cannot migrate a system whose real behaviour is only known to the production server.
A strangler-fig approach puts Laravel in front of the legacy application and moves one route, module or job at a time, with both systems sharing a session and a database during the transition. Every step is releasable, and every step is reversible.
Raw queries and hand-rolled data classes become models, relationships and migrations, with constraints and indexes added where a decade of urgent fixes removed them. Reconciliation checks run against production-shaped data before any cutover is accepted.
Version debt is the quietest risk in a PHP estate. Nothing breaks on the day support ends; the application keeps serving traffic exactly as it did the week before. What changes is that security patches stop arriving, hosting providers begin deprecating the runtime, package maintainers drop the version from their support matrix, and hiring gets harder. By the time it becomes urgent, the gap is several major releases wide and the upgrade has quietly turned into a rewrite.
An upgrade run properly is unglamorous and predictable. Language first, framework second, one release at a time, with the test suite as the safety net — and if there is no test suite, writing enough of one to make the diff trustworthy is part of the work, not an optional extra. The same discipline keeps a modern Laravel build from ageing into the next rescue project, which is why it sits inside our standard web application development engagements rather than being sold as an emergency service.
Framework upgrades handled release by release rather than in one jump — reading each upgrade guide, replacing removed helpers and deprecated signatures, updating configuration, and leaning on the test suite (or writing one first) so the diff can be trusted.
Moving off end-of-life PHP is usually the harder half of the work: implicit nullable parameters, changed string-to-number comparisons, removed extensions and typed properties all surface in application code. We fix the language issues before touching the framework.
Abandoned Composer packages are the most common thing blocking an upgrade. We audit every dependency, replace unmaintained ones with framework features or supported alternatives, and pin what genuinely has to stay — with the reason written down.
A Laravel pod that is as comfortable inheriting somebody else's PHP as it is starting a clean project.
Pods drawn from our own pre-vetted talent network and evaluation platform start delivering in days, not weeks — including on unfamiliar inherited PHP codebases.
Inheriting a live application written by a team you can no longer reach is a normal engagement for us, not an exception we price defensively.
On takeover work, characterization tests come first. Nothing gets restructured until there is a way to prove the behaviour did not change.
AI-accelerated engineers move quickly, and a senior engineer reviews the result before it reaches your repository or your users.
ISO 27001 and CMMI Level 3 aligned, NDA-first, with least-privilege access to your repositories and environments.
We agree the scope and the definition of done up front, and you can start with a small, low-risk pilot before committing — send us a project brief to scope one.
A Laravel development company builds and maintains web applications on the Laravel PHP framework. In practice that covers four distinct kinds of work: building new applications from scratch, adding features to an existing Laravel codebase, migrating a legacy PHP application onto Laravel, and keeping a live application on supported Laravel and PHP versions. Appsierra delivers all four with senior-supervised engineering pods, and most engagements start with an existing codebase rather than an empty repository.
Yes — takeover is one of our most common Laravel engagements. We begin with a codebase audit covering Laravel and PHP versions, dependency health, test coverage and the conventions the previous team used, then agree a stabilisation plan before any feature work resumes. Where there is little or no automated testing, we write characterization tests around the critical paths first, so later refactoring can be proven not to change behaviour. You get a documented handover of what we found and what we changed.
We migrate incrementally rather than rewriting in one go. First we map what the existing application actually does — routes, scheduled jobs, database triggers and the code paths that are still live. Then Laravel is placed in front of the legacy application and functionality is moved across one route, module or job at a time, with both systems sharing a database and session during the transition. Raw queries are rebuilt as Eloquent models and migrations, and every step is releasable and reversible, so the business is never waiting on a single cutover date.
Laravel ships a major release roughly once a year, with bug fixes for around eighteen months and security fixes for around two years per release, so an application typically needs an upgrade every year or two to stay supported. An upgrade means moving release by release rather than jumping several versions: applying each upgrade guide, replacing removed helpers and deprecated method signatures, updating configuration and dependencies, and re-running the test suite. Where the PHP version is also out of support, the language migration is handled first because it usually surfaces more application-level breakage than the framework does.
Yes, provided it is engineered for the load rather than left on defaults. Laravel scales through the same patterns as any mature framework: queued jobs and Horizon to keep slow work off the request cycle, Redis caching, disciplined Eloquent usage to eliminate N+1 queries, properly indexed schemas, read replicas where reads dominate, and Laravel Octane for long-lived workers when the workload justifies it. The limiting factor in most slow Laravel applications we inherit is query and cache design, not the framework itself, so we profile before optimising.
Cost depends on scope, the state of the existing codebase and the engagement model — a fixed-scope build, a dedicated pod or ongoing maintenance are priced differently, and an inherited application with no tests takes more discovery than a greenfield project. We give a written estimate after a short scoping call rather than quoting a rate before seeing the code. Appsierra pods are typically productive within about seven days of agreement, and you can start with a small pilot scope before committing to a longer engagement.
Tell us what you're building, testing or scaling — a senior engineer sends a short, honest read and a low-risk way to start.
A senior engineer will review your note and reach out shortly with an honest read and a low-risk way to start.
Whether you are starting a new Laravel product, migrating a legacy PHP codebase, or taking a live application off an unsupported version, Appsierra's senior-supervised Laravel pods can start in about a week. Contact us to scope the work, or start with a small pilot.
Vetted pods, productive in 7 days.
Tell us what you need to build, test, scale or hire for — QA, software, AI/LLM engineering or a full pod. A senior engineer reviews it and sends a short, honest read, plus a low-risk way to start.
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