1 to 4 week fixed-scope engagement. Written architecture report, prioritized fix list, rewrite vs refactor analysis, and a delivery plan with hours per fix.
- Audit
- Architect
- Scale
monthly retainer
Who this is for
You're a CTO or lead engineer who owns an existing Laravel codebase and needs a senior outside opinion on architecture, performance, or security before you can justify budget to leadership or make a hire. The app probably works, but something is wrong enough that you need it on paper.
The pain today
- The app is slow and nobody can give the CEO a root cause, let alone a fix timeline.
- N+1 queries, no test coverage, no profiling baseline — the team knows it's bad but can't scope it.
- You're stuck between a full rewrite and an endless refactor and nobody will make the call.
- Security and compliance are coming up and you need a written audit trail, not a verbal opinion.
- A key engineer left and no one fully understands why certain architectural decisions were made.
The outcome you get
- A written Laravel architecture report with a prioritized fix list, severity ratings, and hours per fix.
- A documented rewrite vs refactor analysis with 24-month cost math you can present to a board.
- Security posture assessment covering authentication, authorization, and dependency exposure.
- Optional Fractional CTO follow-up at $5,499/mo if scope grows beyond the audit.
- A report the team can act on Monday morning without another meeting to decode it.
What the Laravel audit covers
A laravel consultant engagement runs 1 to 4 weeks as a fixed scope. I read the codebase, run the test suite, pull a week of production logs, profile the slowest endpoints with Xdebug or Blackfire or Laravel Telescope, and talk with two to three engineers on the team.
The written report covers: Eloquent query patterns (N+1 detection, eager loading gaps, chunking on large datasets), queue and job architecture (synchronous work hiding inside the request cycle, failed job handling), caching strategy (Redis tag invalidation, cache hit rates, TTL policy), observability gaps (logging coverage, error tracking, alerting), test coverage mapped to critical paths, deploy pipeline maturity, and security posture. Each finding gets a severity rating — critical, high, medium, or low — and an estimated fix in hours.
The team leaves with a document that tells them exactly what to do next week and how long each item will take.
A written Laravel architecture report with a prioritized fix list, severity ratings, and hours per fix.
Security posture: what I actually check
Security is not a checkbox in this audit. I look at authentication configuration (Sanctum or Passport, token expiry, session lifetime), authorization layers (policy coverage, missing gates on sensitive routes), SQL injection surface in raw query usage, mass assignment exposure in Eloquent models, dependency vulnerability scan against the Composer lock file, and environment variable hygiene (secrets in .env vs secrets management, what's committed).
For teams heading into compliance reviews or enterprise sales, I can frame findings against OWASP Top 10 so your security questionnaire has real answers. The audit won't replace a dedicated penetration test, but it will tell you which vulnerabilities are blocking your next contract.
I've seen Laravel apps with $1M+ in annual revenue running with Auth::id() checks missing on three admin routes. The code was beautiful. The access control was not.
3s → 300ms: API response time.
Rewrite vs refactor: the math I actually use
Most teams agonize over this because nobody will produce a number. I do.
I estimate three paths. The refactor path: hours to fix the top findings plus a regression buffer. The rewrite path: hours to rebuild from a clean spec, including data migration, parallel run, and cutover. The cost of doing nothing: engineer hours lost per month to slow local dev, production incidents, and features that take three times as long as they should.
Most of the Laravel codebases I advise on should refactor, not rewrite. The ones that genuinely need a rewrite almost always share the same profile: Laravel 4 or 5 with a PHP version out of active security support, a data model that cannot be extended without breaking at least two other tables, and no meaningful test coverage anywhere. Everyone else refactors. The math usually makes the decision obvious once it's on paper.
The deliverable includes a written recommendation with the assumptions behind it. If your board wants to revisit the numbers, the assumptions are visible and adjustable.
How a real Laravel audit played out at Cuez
At Cuez by Tinkerlist I inherited a Laravel API that responded in about 3 seconds on the critical path. The engineering team had done profiling but hadn't prioritized what to fix. The audit surfaced four issues: Eloquent chains triggering N+1 on every list endpoint, queue jobs executing synchronous HTTP calls inside the request cycle, Redis cache tags invalidating too broadly, and a missing index on the most-queried join.
Four targeted fixes over six weeks brought the API to 300ms. That's 10x faster. Infrastructure cost dropped roughly 40% as a side effect of fewer database round trips. The audit document came before the code. Leadership could budget the implementation because the numbers were on paper with hours attached.
That sequence matters. The report is what makes the work fundable.
Team knowledge transfer after the audit
A written report has limited value if the team reads it once and files it. The engagement includes a 60-minute debrief with leadership and engineering together, walking through every critical and high finding with context on why it matters and what good looks like.
Two weeks after the debrief I run a follow-up call. By that point the team has usually started on a few fixes and has real questions: edge cases the report didn't anticipate, decisions about whether to batch certain changes, questions about which Horizon configuration actually fits their job volume.
If the team wants deeper Laravel mentoring alongside implementation, the Applications subscription at $4,999/mo covers ongoing implementation with daily async updates. Most customers do the audit first, then decide whether to bring me in to execute.
What the deliverable actually looks like
The report is a PDF and a Notion document (your choice of format). It runs 15 to 30 pages depending on codebase size. The structure is: executive summary (one page, written for a non-technical stakeholder), findings by severity with code references, hours estimate per finding, the rewrite vs refactor section, and an appendix with profiling screenshots and query plans.
Everything references the actual file path and line range in your codebase. 'The N+1 in UserController.php at line 84 costs 47 extra queries on the /api/dashboard endpoint' is more useful than 'there are N+1 query issues'.
I've found that specificity is what makes the report actionable. Vague audit reports get read once. Specific ones get turned into Jira tickets.
Pricing and next steps
The Laravel consulting engagement is billed against the Fractional CTO Advisory rate at $5,499/mo, pro-rated for a 1 to 4 week scope. The rate covers the written report, all profiling sessions, the 60-minute leadership debrief, and the two-week follow-up call.
If the audit recommends implementation work and you want me to execute it, the Applications subscription at $4,999/mo covers ongoing development with 2 to 4 day delivery cycles. The audit is useful even if you hire someone else to implement the fixes. The document belongs to you.
I take on 1 to 2 audit customers per quarter by design. That's not a sales line — it's how I keep the work specific rather than templated.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rescued a slow API that was blocking user growth
Cuez is a live broadcast production tool used by TV teams on air across Europe. I inherited a backend API averaging 3 seconds per response and cut it to 300ms, while reducing infrastructure costs by 40% and leaving the system stable under real production load.
Read the case studyFrequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
1 to 4 weeks depending on codebase size and the depth requested. A typical 50,000-line Laravel application with a test suite takes about 2 weeks. A larger monolith with no tests and no documentation can take the full 4. I scope it at kickoff once I see the repo size and the number of engineers I need to interview.
Read-only access to the repo, production logs, and monitoring dashboards is enough. I do not need write access to production. A sanitized database dump is useful for query profiling. If even that's not possible due to compliance constraints, I can work from the schema and query logs alone — it just takes slightly longer.
All versions, including legacy Laravel 4 and 5 applications. Older versions actually generate more useful audit findings because the gap between current best practices and the existing code is wider. Part of the deliverable for very old versions is a version upgrade path with estimated effort per major step.
Only a minority of the audits I run conclude that a rewrite is cheaper over 24 months than continued patching. In that case the deliverable includes a phased migration plan with a data cutover strategy, parallel-run timeline, and a feature-parity checklist. You can hire me to execute it or take the plan to another team — the document is yours.
Yes. I work remotely by default and have run audits for teams in the US, UK, EU, and Latin America. The kickoff and debrief are video calls. Profiling sessions and engineer interviews are async or scheduled calls. The rest of the work is heads-down on my end.
The report is written for leadership and the team, not against the engineers who built the app. Findings are framed in business terms: hours lost per week, uptime risk, revenue blocked, compliance exposure. I do not write 'this code is bad'. I write 'this pattern costs an estimated 12 engineering hours per month in incident response'.
A developer will tell you what's wrong with the code. The audit also tells you the business cost of each finding, the hours to fix it, and what the 24-month financial picture looks like for each path forward. That framing is what makes the work budgetable. Most teams don't need code review notes — they need a document that justifies an engineering investment to a non-technical decision-maker.