Laravel development company: hire senior Laravel developers for APIs, upgrades and AI features

What do our Laravel development services include?

Laravel development services with us cover four kinds of work: taking over and maintaining existing Laravel codebases, building Laravel APIs and admin panels, upgrading old Laravel and PHP versions, and adding AI features such as chat, summarization or document search to Laravel apps. We are a senior PHP team, so the same engineers handle the framework, the database, the queues and the deployment.

We should be clear about our position. Lytvynov Production is a PHP company, and Symfony is our default for new long-lived products; you can read why on our Symfony development page. Laravel is part of the stack we work with, and many products we are asked to help with already run on it. We do not have a published Laravel case study, so on this page we describe how we work rather than list Laravel projects.

A typical Laravel engagement covers:

• Codebase takeover and maintenance: code review, dependency updates, bug fixes, monitoring and a stable release process.
• Laravel APIs for React, Next.js or mobile front ends, with clear error formats, pagination, authentication and permissions checked on the server.
• Admin panels and back offices for operations teams: orders, users, content, reports and exports.
• Queues and integrations: payments, CRMs, email, webhooks and partner APIs moved out of the web request into queued jobs.
• Version upgrades: older Laravel and PHP versions moved to supported releases one step at a time.
• AI features: OpenAI or Claude API calls, streaming answers, RAG over your data and AI agents that act through your existing business logic.

When should you hire a Laravel development company instead of freelancers?

Hire a Laravel development company when the product is in production and somebody must own it end to end: code review, releases, incidents and the roadmap. A freelancer is a good fit for a well-defined task such as one integration or one screen. Once the app has paying users, background jobs and several integrations, a single person becomes a risk, because nobody reviews the code and nobody covers vacations or sudden departures.

With us, you get a small senior team, usually a PHP engineer who owns the Laravel code, a front-end or mobile engineer when needed, and a lead who owns delivery. Code, servers and accounts stay in your name from day one. How the team model works in detail is on our dedicated development team page.

How do you take over and maintain an existing Laravel codebase?

Taking over a Laravel codebase starts with a written code review, not with new features. Most problems in inherited Laravel apps are not in the framework; they come from logic spread across controllers, models and Blade templates, missing tests around payments, and queues or cron jobs that nobody documented.

Our takeover process:

1. Access and inventory: repository, servers, environment variables, queues, scheduled tasks, third-party services and who holds which account.
2. Code review (1 to 2 weeks): Laravel and PHP versions, abandoned packages, Eloquent query patterns, test coverage, security basics and deployment.
3. Safety net: error monitoring, backups, and tests around the critical flows such as sign-up, checkout and billing.
4. Stabilize production: fix the incidents that repeat, make deployments repeatable, document the setup.
5. Continue the roadmap: features and fixes in small releases, with code review on every change.

We avoid rewrites. If part of the code blocks the product, we replace it module by module behind the same routes, so users never see a big-bang switch.

How do you upgrade an old Laravel application?

Upgrading an old Laravel application means moving one major version at a time, upgrading PHP alongside it, and keeping the app deployable after every step. Apps stuck on old Laravel versions usually also run PHP versions that no longer receive security fixes, and some of their packages have been abandoned.

We start with the dependency list, because abandoned packages usually set the pace more than Laravel itself. Then we add smoke tests on the critical flows, upgrade PHP to a supported 8.x version, and move through Laravel major versions one by one, using automated refactoring tools for the mechanical changes and manual review for the rest. Each step ships to production with monitoring, so it can be rolled back. A typical business application takes from 3 to 12 weeks, depending on the version gap, the package list and the test coverage. The same approach for plain PHP and other frameworks is on our PHP development page.

How do you add AI features to a Laravel app?

AI features in a Laravel app are built as ordinary services and queued jobs that call the OpenAI or Anthropic Claude APIs, so they follow the same permissions, logging and tests as the rest of the code. That matters more than the choice of model: an AI feature that bypasses your business rules is a security problem, not a feature.

What we usually build:

• Generation and rewriting: drafts, summaries, product descriptions or replies, with a review step before anything is sent to a customer.
• Streaming chat inside the app, with answers delivered to the browser as they are generated.
• RAG over your data: answers grounded in your documents, knowledge base or database, with access checks so users only retrieve what they may see. See RAG development.
• AI agents that use your existing Laravel actions as tools, with human approval for anything involving money or customer communication.
• Cost controls: per-user limits, caching of repeated requests and token usage reports in the admin panel.

The full approach to adding models to an existing product is on our AI integration page.

Laravel or Symfony: will you recommend switching?

We will not recommend switching a working Laravel product to Symfony. Both are mature PHP frameworks; Laravel usually wins on speed to first release and its ecosystem, Symfony on explicit architecture and long-term support releases. For an existing product, the cost of a migration is almost never justified by the framework alone.

Where the choice is still open, for a new product, we explain the trade-offs and recommend based on your team, your domain and how long the product should live. Our honest comparison is in the guide Symfony vs Laravel for SaaS. If you already have Laravel developers in-house, staying on Laravel is usually the right answer, and we will work in your conventions.

How much does it cost to hire Laravel developers?

Cost depends on scope and team shape far more than on the framework. As orientation, with us:

Our minimum project size is $10,000, and every milestone gets a fixed quote after a short scoping call. For a broader view of AI build costs see AI integration, and for subscription products see SaaS development.

How we work on Laravel projects

We start with a 30-minute call about the product, the current state of the code and what is not working. For existing apps, the first milestone is a code review with a written report and a plan. For new builds, we agree the scope and the first release. Then we deliver in milestones with weekly demos, in your repositories and cloud accounts, with AI coding agents handling routine work such as tests and refactors under senior review.

Tell us about your Laravel app on our contact page, or describe the scope in our project estimate form.