Laravel consultant for teams who need a senior outside opinion
1 to 4 week engagement. Written architecture report, prioritized fix list, delivery plan with hours. Optional implementation follow-up.
Who this is for
CTO or lead engineer who owns an existing Laravel codebase and needs a senior outside opinion on architecture, performance, or hiring a Laravel team.
The pain today
- The app is slow and nobody can tell the CEO why.
- N+1 queries everywhere, no test coverage, no profiling baseline.
- The team cannot decide whether a rewrite or a refactor is cheaper.
- You need a written document leadership can actually read.
The outcome you get
- A written Laravel architecture report with a prioritized fix list.
- A delivery plan with estimated hours per fix.
- Optional Fractional CTO follow-up at $4,500 per month if scope grows.
- A clear answer to rewrite vs refactor, with the math to back it.
What the audit covers
The Laravel audit is a 1 to 4 week fixed-scope engagement. 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 interview two to three engineers. The deliverable is a written report covering queue and job architecture, Eloquent query patterns (N+1, eager loading, chunking), caching strategy (tag invalidation, Redis hit rates), observability, test coverage by critical path, deploy pipeline maturity, and security posture. Each finding gets a severity rating and an estimated fix in hours. The team leaves knowing exactly what to do Monday morning.
How a real 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 team had profiled but not prioritized. The audit surfaced four issues: Eloquent chains triggering N+1 on every list endpoint, queue jobs doing synchronous HTTP inside the request cycle, Redis cache tags invalidating too aggressively, and a missing index on the most-queried join. Four fixes over six weeks brought the API to 300ms (10x faster) and cut infrastructure cost by roughly 40%. The audit document came first. The code came after. Leadership could budget the work because the numbers were on paper.
Rewrite vs refactor — the math I actually use
The question is never 'is the code ugly'. The question is 'what will this cost over 24 months'. I estimate the refactor path (hours to fix the top 10 findings plus a buffer for regression), the rewrite path (hours to rebuild from a clean spec including data migration), and the 24-month carrying cost of doing nothing (engineer hours lost to slow local dev, production incidents, missed features). Roughly 80% of the teams I advise should refactor. The 20% that should rewrite almost always have a framework version they cannot upgrade (Laravel 4 or 5) plus a PHP version out of security support. Everyone else refactors.
Pricing and next steps
The consulting engagement is billed against the Fractional CTO Advisory rate at $4,500 per month, pro-rated for 1 to 4 week scope. You get the written report, a 60-minute debrief with leadership, and a follow-up call two weeks later to answer questions as the team digests the findings. If you want me to execute the fix list afterwards, the Applications subscription at $3,499 per month covers implementation. Most clients do the audit first, then decide. The audit is useful even if you hire someone else to fix it.
Recent proof
A comparable engagement, delivered and documented.
Rescued a slow API that was blocking user growth
Refactored the backend architecture, making the system far more responsive and scalable for the growing user base.
Frequently asked questions
The questions prospects ask before they book.
- How long does the Laravel audit take?
- 1 to 4 weeks depending on codebase size and depth requested. A typical 50k line Laravel app with a test suite takes 2 weeks. A larger monolith with no tests takes 4.
- Do you need production access?
- Read-only access to the repo, logs, and monitoring is enough. I do not need write access to production. Database schema dumps and sample data are useful — I work off sanitized copies.
- Can you run the audit remotely?
- Yes. I work remotely by default and have done audits for teams in the US, UK, EU, and Latin America. Kickoff and debrief are video calls. The rest is async.
- What if the audit recommends a rewrite?
- Roughly 20% of the audits I run do. In that case the deliverable includes a migration plan with phases, data cutover strategy, and parallel-run timeline. You can hire me to execute or take the plan to another team.
- Will the report hurt morale if it is critical?
- The report is written for leadership and the team, not against them. Findings are framed as business cost (hours lost, uptime risk, revenue blocked) not as code shaming.
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