When what you need is an application rather than a website, a CMS becomes something you fight. Laravel is where most of our bespoke application work happens.
A website publishes content. An application does something: processes a workflow, calculates something, holds records that people act on, enforces who may do what. The moment the second description fits better than the first, building on a content management system means spending your budget working around assumptions that were never meant for you.
Laravel is a framework rather than a product, so there is no admin area you are stuck with and no plugin ecosystem to depend on. That is the advantage and the cost: everything is built rather than configured, which is why we use it when it is the right tool and not by default.
In practice our Laravel work is portals, internal tools, booking and scheduling systems, APIs feeding other software, and applications that have to talk to several business systems at once.
What we do
Working UK-wide — directly with businesses, and white label behind design and marketing agencies.
Discuss a projectWhere signed-in users see their own data — orders, documents, usage, history — pulled from systems that already hold it.
The quoting, scheduling or tracking system currently being run as a spreadsheet that only one person fully understands.
Services other software consumes, documented and versioned so changing them later does not break everybody at once.
Multi-step processes with approvals, states and an audit trail of who did what.
Applications sitting between several business systems, which is often the actual requirement behind a request for a portal.
Laravel applications somebody else started, including the unglamorous work of getting tests and deployment in place.
If the site is mostly pages your team edits, a CMS is cheaper to build and cheaper to change. We will say so rather than take the larger project.
There is no plugin for the thing you want. That is why it fits, and also why it costs more than configuring a product.
A custom application has no automatic updates. Framework and dependency updates are a retained-support job, and worth budgeting for.
A lot of our work is delivered white label or under agreement, so these describe the problem and the approach rather than naming the client.
An API-connected membership platform handling publications, events and a two-way CRM sync — thousands of profiles and hundreds of transactions a week.
Web application · SubscriptionA subscription research platform serving over 3,000 subscribers across 160+ countries, with daily content and recurring monthly payments.
Membership · CRM syncA membership website for payroll professionals, with member benefits and book sales, kept in step with the client’s CRM by a bespoke two-way API integration.
Describe the process or the problem rather than the technology. We will tell you whether it warrants a custom application, and when something simpler would get you most of the way.