Laravel Startup Project, From First Command to Paying Users
How to start a Laravel startup project, from the first command and starter kit to billing, hosting costs and an MVP that takes real payments.
How to start a Laravel startup project, the short answer
Install PHP 8.3 or newer and the Laravel installer, run laravel new, and pick the starter kit that matches the people who will maintain the code. Then make five decisions in the first week, covering tenancy, billing, background jobs, hosting and tests, before you write a single feature. Everything after that is building the smallest version of your product that someone will pay for.
I build Laravel projects for clients, from the Next Chapter Consultancy site, a Laravel and MySQL build with its own admin that took about six weeks, to backends for products that bill their users. The order below is the one I follow on every new Laravel startup project. Most of the expensive rewrites I get hired to fix trace back to a week-one decision somebody skipped.
Why startups still pick Laravel in 2026
Laravel gives a small team most of a SaaS backend on day one. Login, registration, password resets, email verification and two-factor authentication come with the official starter kits. Queues, scheduled jobs, file storage, mail, websockets, feature flags and subscription billing are all first-party packages, so you write product code from the first afternoon instead of plumbing.
The release rhythm is predictable too. Laravel 13 shipped on 17 March 2026 with a minimum of PHP 8.3, and it gets bug fixes until the third quarter of 2027 and security fixes until 17 March 2028 (Laravel release notes). A new major version arrives roughly once a year, and the team aims to keep each upgrade to a day or less. Laravel 13 also added a first-party AI SDK for text generation, tool-calling agents and embeddings, plus vector search on PostgreSQL with pgvector, which matters if your product will need AI features later.
The talent pool is the quiet advantage. PHP runs 69.7 percent of websites whose server-side language is known, according to W3Techs in October 2026, so hosting is cheap and Laravel developers are easy to find in most markets. If you are still deciding between Laravel and a JavaScript stack, I compared the two properly in Next.js vs Laravel, and I explained my own reasons in why I stick with PHP.
Setting up the project in the first hour
The fastest route on a Mac or Windows machine is Laravel Herd, which installs PHP, Composer and the Laravel installer in one go. If PHP and Composer are already on your machine, these commands are all you need.
composer global require laravel/installer
laravel new my-app
cd my-app
npm install && npm run build
composer run devThe installer asks three questions, about your starter kit, your testing framework and your database. The app then runs at http://localhost:8000. A fresh project uses SQLite by default, which is fine for the first day. Switch to MySQL or PostgreSQL before any real user signs up, and choose PostgreSQL if you expect to add semantic search or other AI features, because Laravel's vector queries run on pgvector.
Which starter kit to choose
Every kit ships the same Laravel backend with authentication and optional team support. The difference is the frontend, so choose it by who will maintain the code, not by what is fashionable this month.
| Starter kit | Frontend stack | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|
| Livewire | Livewire 4, Blade, Tailwind and Flux UI | Your team writes PHP, the product is forms, tables and dashboards, and you want one language everywhere |
| React | Inertia 3, React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind 4 and shadcn/ui | You plan to hire React developers or the interface is rich and highly interactive |
| Vue | Inertia 3, Vue 3 Composition API, TypeScript and shadcn-vue | Your frontend people already know Vue |
| Svelte | Inertia 3, Svelte 5, TypeScript and shadcn-svelte | Your team prefers Svelte and accepts a smaller hiring pool |
Each kit also comes in a WorkOS AuthKit variant that adds Google, Microsoft, GitHub and Apple sign-in, passkeys, magic links and SSO. WorkOS is free up to one million monthly active users, so for a B2B product that will eventually sell to companies wanting SSO it is worth choosing on day one (starter kit docs).
Five decisions to make in week one
These five are cheap to get right at the start and expensive to change once customers rely on the app. I settle them in writing before building features.
1. One customer per account, or teams
If you sell to businesses, turn on the starter kit's team support when you create the project. Every new user then gets a personal team, routes are scoped to the current team such as /{current_team}/dashboard, and the kit checks that a user belongs to a team before letting them in. Put a team_id on every business table from the first migration and write a test that tries to read another team's data. Adding tenancy later means touching every query in the codebase, and a single missed scope leaks one customer's data to another.
2. How the product takes money
Laravel Cashier handles subscriptions, trials, plan changes and invoices for Stripe or Paddle. Stripe gives you the most control and the lowest fees. Paddle acts as the merchant of record, which means it collects and pays sales tax and VAT for you, and that saves a small team a real headache when customers arrive from many countries. Either way, gate paid features behind a middleware that checks $user->subscribed(), and test the webhooks before launch, because a missed webhook is how users end up with access they never paid for.
3. Background jobs from the start
Anything slower than a database query belongs on a queue, including emails, webhooks, PDF generation, imports and every AI call. Start with the database queue driver if you like, then move to Redis with Horizon once volume grows. If you put this off, every slow third-party API becomes a slow page for your users.
4. Where it runs
Choose hosting that can run a queue worker and a scheduler. That one requirement rules out most cheap shared hosting, which is why I steer startup projects away from it even though it costs a few dollars.
| Option | Price | Good for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laravel Cloud | Starter from $5 a month plus usage, with $5 of usage included; Laravel's own SaaS MVP example comes to about $34 a month | Founders who never want to manage a server; apps scale to zero when idle | Usage pricing, so set the spending limit on day one |
| Laravel Forge | $12 a month on Hobby, plus the server you rent from a provider | Teams that want full server control at a flat price | You still own server updates and backups |
| Shared PHP hosting | A few dollars a month | Brochure sites and simple content sites | Usually no long-running queue workers, which breaks most SaaS features |
Prices are from the Laravel Cloud and Forge pricing pages in October 2026.
5. Tests and deployment from the first commit
Pick Pest when the installer asks, and write feature tests for the paths that would hurt most if they broke, meaning sign-up, payment, team isolation and the one workflow your product exists for. Add a GitHub Actions pipeline that runs the tests and Laravel Pint on every push, and deploy from the main branch only. Twenty tests written in week one save you from the Friday-night hotfix that takes down billing.
What the first version should actually contain
A Laravel MVP needs fewer parts than founders expect. Here is the list I scope against, and anything not on it waits until users ask for it.
- Accounts and teams. Straight from the starter kit, restyled to your brand.
- One core workflow. The single job a customer pays you to do, built properly with validation, permissions and an audit trail.
- Billing. Cashier with one or two plans and a free trial. Pricing pages can stay simple for now.
- An admin area. Filament, the popular open-source admin panel built on Livewire, gives you user management and support tools in days rather than weeks.
- Email and monitoring. Transactional email through a proper provider, error tracking with Laravel Nightwatch or Sentry, and automated database backups that you have actually tested restoring.
Leave out microservices, Kubernetes, a separate API with a separate single-page app, and Octane until a profiler tells you that you need it. Inertia already gives you a React or Vue interface without running two codebases. If you really want a Next.js frontend for SEO reasons, the split I recommend is covered in my comparison.
What a Laravel startup project costs and how long it takes
For a focused Laravel SaaS MVP built by one senior developer, plan on four to eight weeks from kickoff to the first paying user. That covers the starter kit, teams, one core workflow, billing, an admin and a production deployment. The Next Chapter site, with its custom design, MySQL content model and staff admin, took about six weeks from start to launch.
On price, my web builds start at $3,500 and backend and API work at $3,000, with the real figure set after a short scoping call. A SaaS MVP with billing and teams usually lands well above those starting points, because the work is bigger than a website. There is no deposit, and fixed-price work is paid in four milestones, 25% after each quarter of the work is finished, which I explain in how milestone payments work. Running costs stay small early on. Expect tens of dollars a month for hosting, email and monitoring until you have real traffic, plus your payment provider's fee on each sale.
Mistakes that sink Laravel startup projects
None of these are exotic, and I have cleaned up each one on client projects more than once.
- Debug mode left on in production. With
APP_DEBUG=truea crash page can show stack traces and configuration details to anyone. Set it to false and never commit the.envfile to git. - Missing tenant scopes. One query without a
team_idfilter shows one customer another customer's data. Hosted databases fail the same way, as I covered in the 16,000 exposed Supabase databases. - All logic in controllers. Move business rules into action or service classes, the same pattern the starter kits use for registration, so a web form, an API and a queued job can share them.
- AI-written code nobody reviewed. AI assistants write Laravel quickly, but they also skip authorization checks with total confidence. I wrote about that risk in why vibe coding is a timebomb.
- Starting on an old version. Laravel 12 stopped receiving bug fixes on 13 August 2026 and gets security fixes only until 24 February 2027. Every new project should start on Laravel 13.
Questions people ask about starting a Laravel startup project
Is Laravel good for a startup in 2026?
For most SaaS products, portals, marketplaces and internal tools, yes. Authentication, billing, queues and team support are ready on day one, Laravel 13 receives security fixes until March 2028, and PHP developers are easy to hire. It is a weaker fit when your whole team writes only JavaScript, when the product is mostly an SEO-led content site, or when the core of the product is machine learning that lives in Python.
Which Laravel starter kit should a startup use?
Choose by who will maintain the code. The Livewire kit suits a team that writes PHP and a product built from forms, tables and dashboards. The React kit suits a team that will hire React developers or needs a rich interactive interface. All kits share the same Laravel backend, and the WorkOS variants add social login, passkeys and SSO.
How long does it take to build a Laravel MVP?
One senior developer can usually take a focused SaaS MVP from kickoff to the first paying user in four to eight weeks. That includes accounts and teams, one core workflow, billing, an admin and a production deployment. Each extra third-party integration adds time, so keep the first version narrow.
How much does it cost to host a Laravel startup project?
Very little at the start. Laravel Cloud starts at $5 a month plus usage, and Laravel's own example of a SaaS MVP comes to about $34 a month. Forge costs $12 a month on its Hobby plan plus the server you rent. Expect tens of dollars a month in total until you have real traffic.
Should I use Laravel Cloud or Laravel Forge?
Choose Laravel Cloud if you never want to manage a server and your traffic is quiet at night or at weekends, since apps scale to zero when idle. Choose Forge if you want flat, predictable costs and full control of the server, or if you run other apps on the same machine. Both deploy from GitHub with zero downtime.
Can Laravel handle a startup that grows fast?
Yes. You scale a Laravel app by running more app servers behind a load balancer, moving slow work onto queues and caching hot data in Redis or Valkey. In my experience the first bottleneck is almost always a slow database query, not PHP. Laravel Cloud's Growth plan autoscales up to 10 replicas without any server work.
Do I need a separate frontend like Next.js with Laravel?
Usually not. Inertia lets the React, Vue and Svelte starter kits build a modern single-page interface on top of normal Laravel routes and controllers, so you run one codebase. A separate Next.js frontend makes sense mainly for a large, SEO-heavy marketing site in front of the app.
Planning a Laravel startup project of your own
Do you have an idea and need it live with real payments in weeks rather than quarters? Did an earlier build stall halfway? Send me what the product should do and who it is for. I'll reply with the stack I would use, the week-one decisions that matter for your case and a rough price. See what hiring me looks like, or start a project today.
You can browse everything I build under services, including web development and backend and API work. The case studies and my career page hold the proof. When you are ready, get in touch. I read and answer every message myself.