Hire Laravel Developer: Apps, Filament Panels, Upgrades and AI

What do I build as a freelance Laravel developer?

I build the Laravel applications a business runs on: SaaS products, CRMs and internal tools, booking platforms, customer portals, APIs and the admin panels behind them. One developer handles the data model, code, tests and deployment.

APIs for mobile apps and partners are versioned from the first route, with token authentication such as Laravel Sanctum.

When should you hire a Laravel developer directly instead of an agency?

Hire one experienced developer directly when the work fits in one person's head: one product, one admin panel, one upgrade or one set of AI features. You talk to the person writing the code, with no account manager in between.

An agency or a staffing marketplace fits better when you need several developers at once, a designer and a project manager under one contract, or someone on call around the clock. I am one developer, and I say so before you sign.

Whoever you hire, ask three things: which live Laravel work you can open, which Laravel and PHP versions they would choose and why, and who reads the code before it reaches production.

Can you upgrade an old Laravel app to Laravel 13?

Yes. I move an app one major version at a time, following Laravel's upgrade guide for each step, on a staging copy, with the tests run after every step. Skipping versions saves nothing, because each guide lists the breaking changes for its own step only.

The support table in the Laravel release notes shows why it matters:

The framework step is rarely the slow part. The time goes into the PHP version on the server, packages nobody updated, and code that relies on old defaults. The official upgrade guide estimates 10 minutes for the move from 12.x to 13.0, and still lists changes that need a decision:

• The CSRF middleware is now PreventRequestForgery; VerifyCsrfToken survives only as a deprecated alias, so references to it get updated.
• The new skeleton sets the session serialization option to json. Switching an existing app from php signs every user out, so we pick the moment together or keep php.
• The cache config gains serializable_classes, set to false. An app that caches PHP objects needs an explicit list of allowed classes.

The guide also names Laravel Shift, a community-maintained upgrade service, and the /upgrade-laravel-v13 command that Laravel Boost adds to Claude Code for apps on Laravel 12. Whatever drafts the changes, I review each one and run the full test suite.

What does a Filament admin panel give your team?

It gives your staff a back office for lists, filters, forms, dashboards and permissions, built on your existing Laravel models in the same codebase as the app. Filament describes itself as a server-driven UI framework for Laravel: screens are defined in PHP, on top of Livewire, Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS.

This website's blog posts, invoices, coupons, contact messages, menus and settings are all managed in a Filament panel. In a client panel I set up:

• A resource for each business object, with the filters and bulk actions your staff use
• Roles and policies, so a support agent cannot issue refunds or delete records
• Dashboard widgets for the few numbers someone checks every morning
• Actions that call your own services, such as sending a quote, instead of editing raw rows

The current major release, Filament 5, needs PHP 8.2+, Laravel 11.28+ and Livewire 4 (Filament upgrade guide). Older panels move forward with Filament's upgrade script, but the v5 guide warns that manual changes may still be needed and that some plugins may not support v5 yet, so I check every plugin before starting.

How do you add AI features to a Laravel app?

On Laravel 12 or 13, a good base is the Laravel AI SDK, Laravel's own package that puts providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini behind one API for agents, tools, structured output and embeddings. Its current release requires PHP 8.3 and Laravel 12 or 13, so an older app is upgraded first.

• An assistant inside your app that answers from your own records, with conversations saved by the SDK's RemembersConversations trait.
• Drafting of proposals, replies or summaries as structured output your code can check. In JK Tour CRM, an AI assistant can draft an itinerary using the customer's own API key.
• Semantic search over documents with embeddings; Laravel 13 adds vector queries for PostgreSQL with pgvector.
• An MCP server built with Laravel MCP, so AI clients can use your app's tools and data, protected by OAuth through Laravel Passport or by Sanctum tokens.

Three safeguards go into every AI feature. Tools that change data are marked as needing approval, and the agent pauses until a person approves the call. Failover sends a request to a backup provider when the main one is rate-limited or unavailable. Tests fake the agent with fake() and preventStrayPrompts(), so the suite never calls a paid API. For agents that act across several systems, see AI agent development.

How do you use Claude Code on a Laravel project without losing control?

I treat Claude Code as a fast assistant whose work I check, never as the developer of record. Each task starts with a short plan I approve, runs in its own branch, and ends with passing tests and my reading of the whole diff.

On Laravel 12 and newer, Laravel Boost, Laravel's first-party package for AI-assisted work, can be added. It writes Laravel guidelines into CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md inside its own block, leaving your own rules intact, and lets the agent read the database schema, the last logged error and the docs for your installed versions. Production credentials never reach the agent; it works against a local or staging database.

The full routine is in my Claude Code workflow for client projects; for work outside Laravel, see Claude Code development.

Who owns the code, the repository and the accounts?

You own the repository and every account. The repository lives in your GitHub or GitLab account, or moves there at handover if I start it in mine, and the server, domain, payment and AI provider accounts are opened in your name. I work with access you grant and can remove at any time. Who holds the rights to the custom code is written into the quote before work starts, and open-source packages keep their own licenses.

How do you test and hand over a Laravel project?

With feature tests that use the app the way a person does, written in Pest or PHPUnit to match your project and run on every change. They cover the core workflow, each permission rule, payment webhooks and AI calls with faked responses. For an upgrade, I write the tests first against the old version, so they prove the new version behaves the same.

At handover you receive:

• The repository, with a README that sets the project up in a few commands
• Every environment variable listed and explained, with no secret values in the code
• Deployment, rollback and backup-restore steps, with queue worker and scheduler settings
• A walkthrough call, then two weeks of support for defects in the delivered scope

The day-to-day routine is on how I work.

Which Laravel projects do I turn down?

I turn down work I cannot do well or honestly. That covers nulled or pirated scripts and paid packages without a license, copies of another company's product, and one-off error fixes with no wider project, which your host's support or an AI assistant handles faster. I do not certify apps against PCI DSS or SOC 2.