PHP development services built for teams that ship
Full Scale is a PHP development company that delivers custom PHP applications, Laravel and Symfony platforms, legacy PHP modernization, and PHP version upgrades through senior Filipino engineers embedded in your team. AMC Theatres and dozens of other product companies run on engineers we placed. Staff augmentation model means your first sprint starts in as little as 7 days.
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;
class OrderController extends Controller
{
public function store(StoreOrderRequest $req)
{
$order = Order::create($req->validated());
return OrderResource::make($order);
}
}PHP teams trusted by SaaS platforms, scale-ups, and Fortune 500s
Previously founded VinSolutions ($150M+ exit) and Stackify
Full Scale exists because of Filipino PHP developers
Here is the part most people do not know: the only reason Full Scale even exists is that we were looking for PHP developers years ago and ended up hiring some in the Philippines off Upwork. Upwork itself turned into a giant headache. The Filipino PHP developers were amazing. That contrast was the wedge that became this company.
The first time I ever saw PHP was running Nagios for server monitoring and powering a WordPress site. To be honest, I could not imagine why anyone would build real software with it. Then Facebook did. PHP has changed dramatically since then, and frameworks like Laravel turned it into a solid platform with the same modern features you get from every other popular web stack.
People still ask me whether PHP is dead. The longer I do this, the more confident I get about the answer. At Full Scale Ventures we are building new startups on Laravel today by choice. It ships fast and stays out of our way. Laravel is opinionated, and that is the part the JavaScript world keeps missing. But Laravel is one part of the PHP story. The PHP development services we provide cover the whole language: custom PHP, Symfony, CodeIgniter, legacy modernization, version upgrades, and yes, Laravel. If your project is Laravel-specific, there is a separate Laravel development services page for that. Either way, PHP is in great shape and we are betting real money on it.
Five reasons PHP is the right stack for web products and SaaS platforms
If you have already committed to PHP, you do not need to read this. If you are still evaluating whether PHP is the right call for your project, or whether to stay with it rather than migrate to a different runtime, these are the technical and practical arguments that hold up in production, not in a vendor pitch.
It powers a huge share of the web and is proven at scale
PHP runs WordPress, which accounts for roughly 43% of all websites, and underlies major SaaS platforms, marketplaces, and content-driven products built on Laravel and Symfony. That is not a legacy footnote: it means the libraries, hosting infrastructure, and operational knowledge to run PHP at scale are widely available and battle-tested in a way that newer server-side languages are not.
PHP 8.x is genuinely fast and modern
PHP 8.0 introduced JIT compilation. PHP 8.1 added enums, fibers for concurrency, readonly properties, and intersection types. PHP 8.2 brought readonly classes and deprecation of dynamic properties. PHP 8.3 added typed class constants and a more capable json_validate(). The codebase your team ships in 2025 is not PHP 5. The runtime performance of modern PHP is competitive with Node.js for typical API workloads, and the type system is now strong enough for a real static analysis pass.
The largest web developer talent pool keeps hiring fast and cost reasonable
PHP has more active developers worldwide than nearly any other server-side language, and the Philippines has one of the deepest PHP benches in Asia. Senior Laravel and Symfony engineers are available without the six-week sourcing cycle you face for Go or Rust talent. That supply depth keeps time-to-start short and lets us match skills precisely rather than fitting whoever is available.
Laravel and Symfony bring real structure to serious projects
Laravel 11 ships with Eloquent ORM, Queues via Horizon, Broadcasting, Cashier for billing, Passport and Sanctum for auth, and a testing suite (Pest or PHPUnit) out of the box. Symfony provides a component-based architecture used by Drupal, Shopware, and dozens of enterprise platforms. These are not toy frameworks: they enforce separation of concerns, provide a real service container, and let senior engineers apply repository patterns, event sourcing, and domain-driven design without stitching together ten third-party packages.
Fast time-to-market for SaaS, marketplaces, and content platforms
When the goal is a working product in the market quickly, PHP's combination of mature scaffolding (Laravel Jetstream, Breeze, Filament for admin), widely understood patterns, and available talent gives you a real speed advantage over stacks where you assemble the pieces yourself. For content platforms and SaaS products especially, the trade-offs favor PHP. We would point you to Node.js or Python for heavy real-time or machine learning workloads where those runtimes have a genuine edge.
AI-powered PHP engineers, trained on Product Driven principles
Most PHP teams adopting AI are shipping more code without shipping better software. The slop volume climbs, production bugs follow, and engineers whose only skill is typing faster end up costing more in cleanup than they save in keystrokes.
Full Scale PHP developers are trained on something different: the Product Driven approach from Matt's book, combined with the full modern AI toolkit (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor). They think first, type second, and use AI for the parts where judgment doesn't add value. That combination is rare, and it is what PHP teams should actually be hiring for in 2026.
Product Driven engineering
Our engineers are trained on the five pillars from Matt's book: Vision, Focus, Clarity, Ownership, and Courage. The result is developers who push back on bad product decisions, ask whether a ticket should exist before writing it, and own the outcome of what ships. They are not order takers.
Read Product Driven, the bookAI as a thinking partner
Every PHP engineer on our bench works with GitHub Copilot, Claude, and Cursor every day. They use AI to explore options, scaffold the boring parts, generate test suites, and review their own pull requests before a human ever sees them. Judgment stays with the engineer, the grunt work moves to the machine.
The PHP engineers I want on my team don't get caught by the AI slop trap. They reason about the system before they reach for Copilot, and they use AI for the parts where judgment doesn't matter. That's who we hire and train at Full Scale.
Full-language PHP coverage, delivered via staff augmentation
This page covers the PHP language broadly: custom raw PHP builds, Symfony and CodeIgniter applications, legacy PHP modernization, PHP 7-to-8 version upgrades, and integration work. Laravel is one framework in that set. If your project is Laravel-specific, see our dedicated Laravel development services page. All of these services are delivered by senior Filipino PHP engineers embedded in your team through Full Scale's staff augmentation model.
Custom PHP application development
Custom PHP development means greenfield builds on Laravel 11 or Symfony 7, with proper service container use, repository patterns where they earn their complexity, and a real domain model rather than a CRUD scaffold. The resulting codebase survives the first 18 months without a rewrite.
Hire dedicated Laravel developersEnterprise PHP and SaaS platforms
Enterprise PHP work is multi-tenant SaaS, role-based access, audit logging, and subscription billing: the unglamorous stuff that platforms live or die on. Our engineers have shipped Laravel-based SaaS at every stage from seed to public, and they know what production load looks like.
PHP API development and system integration
We build REST APIs with OpenAPI contracts, JSON:API resources, and contract testing in CI. Third-party integrations get proper retry logic, idempotency keys, and webhook signatures, which gives you an API layer your downstream consumers don't curse at.
Hire a dedicated API developerWordPress and WooCommerce development
WordPress development goes well past installing a theme. We build custom blocks, headless WordPress backends, REST API extensions, and WooCommerce stores with bespoke checkout flows. The bench includes engineers who have shipped plugins used across millions of installs.
Hire dedicated WordPress developersLegacy PHP modernization and migration
We run production PHP migration projects from PHP 5 or 7 to PHP 8.3 without downtime, and from custom frameworks or older CodeIgniter codebases to Laravel or Symfony. We know which deprecated patterns break, where unsafe SQL hides, and how to stage the cutover so business doesn't stop.
Hire dedicated CodeIgniter developersPHP performance and debugging
Our PHP performance work covers Blackfire and Tideways profiling, OPcache tuning, Eloquent query optimization, Redis caching strategies, and slow query log triage. These are skills most offshore PHP shops have never developed, so hire us when your application is slow and nobody knows why.
Architecture patterns our PHP engineers apply in production
Most offshore PHP shops deliver a working application at handoff. What determines whether it is still working and maintainable 18 months later is the architecture decisions made in the first sprint. These are the patterns our engineers in the Philippines reach for, and the reasoning behind when each one earns its complexity.
Layered and Clean Architecture
Domain logic at the center, infrastructure at the edge. Controllers stay thin, application services handle use cases, and the domain model is independent of Laravel or Symfony internals. The codebase survives a queue driver swap or a cache backend change without rewriting business logic.
Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
Bounded contexts, aggregates, value objects, and domain events. We apply DDD when the business logic is the hard part of the project, not as a default. For a multi-tenant SaaS with complex billing or a marketplace with nuanced fulfillment rules, the investment in a proper domain model pays back in maintainability.
Repository Pattern with Eloquent or Doctrine
Data access abstracted behind repository interfaces so the domain layer never imports an Eloquent Model directly. Eloquent for projects that want readable, expressive queries. Doctrine for projects that need strict persistence-layer separation and unit-of-work semantics. Both tested against the real database in CI, not just against mocks.
CQRS and Queue Workers with Laravel Horizon
Read models and write models separated so each can be optimized independently. Heavy operations offloaded to queued jobs via Laravel Horizon or Symfony Messenger rather than blocking the HTTP request. Dead-letter queues monitored, retries configured, and queue workers included in the observability setup from day one.
API-First with PSR-7 / PSR-15 and OpenAPI
PHP APIs designed contract-first: OpenAPI spec written before controllers, request validation enforced at the boundary, responses typed via resource classes. JSON:API for complex relational APIs, REST with versioned routes for simpler ones. Contract testing in CI so a schema change breaks the pipeline before it breaks a consumer.
Modular Monolith and Incremental Service Extraction
Starting with a well-modularized Laravel or Symfony application and extracting services when there is a real scaling or team-ownership reason, rather than microservices by default. Module boundaries enforced by Composer package separation or deptrac rules. We recommend this path for most early-stage PHP SaaS and marketplace builds: ship fast, then decompose deliberately.
Opinionated takes on PHP from engineers who ship it
Most vendors tell you PHP is the right choice for everything. We will tell you when it is not. These are the actual opinions held by the engineers at our Philippines development center, based on building and maintaining PHP systems in production, not talking points from a sales deck.
Content platforms, SaaS products with moderate concurrency, marketplaces, and anything that will lean on WordPress or a headless CMS backend. Projects where the team needs to iterate fast, where Laravel's scaffolding (queues, auth, billing, notifications) saves weeks, and where the hiring pool matters because the project will be maintained long-term. PHP 8.x is a reasonable choice for most web application backends that do not have heavy real-time or data-processing requirements.
Real-time applications with persistent connections at scale (live bidding, multiplayer, event streaming): Node.js or Go handles concurrency more naturally. Machine learning, data pipelines, and scientific computing: Python is the right call and PHP has no comparable library depth there. High-throughput systems where cold-start overhead matters or where Go's binary size and startup time are genuinely an advantage. We will tell you when another stack is the better fit rather than defaulting to PHP because it is what we have on the bench.
We ship typed PHP 8 with strict_types declarations, PHPStan or Psalm at level 6 or above, Pest or PHPUnit test suites, and feature tests that cover the happy path and the failure cases. We refuse fat controllers where business logic belongs in a service or domain layer, untyped spaghetti with no static analysis, raw SQL built by string concatenation (prepared statements are not optional), and WordPress stretched into an application backend without a real plugin or API boundary. We also refuse the pattern of deploying with debug mode left on and error logging turned off.
Big-bang rewrites that try to move an entire PHP 5 or early PHP 7 codebase to PHP 8.3 in one release without incremental compatibility passes. WordPress sites that grew into applications: at some point the plugin model stops working and you need a real API boundary, but teams keep adding plugins rather than drawing that line. Skipping Laravel major versions (8 to 11) because the upgrade feels expensive, then discovering that two skipped versions makes the gap unpayable. And legacy Symfony 2 or 3 codebases where the migration estimate was built on find-and-replace rather than a real inventory of deprecated surface area.
From first call to production: how a PHP project runs at Full Scale
Staff augmentation without a delivery framework is just headcount. Here is what the engagement actually looks like from the first conversation to a deployed production system and the ongoing work that comes after.
We scope the engagement together: what to build first, what specializations to staff (Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, API), and what the first sprint should deliver. You walk away with a staffing plan and a candidate shortlist, not a 40-page requirements document.
You interview our pre-vetted candidates and select who starts. We handle employment, payroll, and equipment setup at our Philippines delivery center. Your engineer gets access to your repo, your tools, and your standups. First commit typically happens within the first week.
Your engineer works in your sprint cadence, under your tech lead, committing to your repo. You see the work in progress, not at a scheduled demo. Architecture decisions happen in your standups, not behind a project management wall. The sprint velocity is yours to direct.
Our engineers write tests as part of delivery. Feature and unit tests in Pest or PHPUnit, static analysis with PHPStan or Psalm (configured at a meaningful level, not just turned on), and integration tests against real dependencies. AI-assisted PR review before human review. Code that ships is code that has been tested and analyzed.
Your engineers own the production deployment: infrastructure as code, observability from day one (application logging, query monitoring, error tracking via Sentry or equivalent), and runbook documentation for the most likely failure modes. They stay on after launch. Post-launch bugs go into your backlog like any other work, not into a warranty period clause in a contract.
How a PHP development project starts at Full Scale
No discovery phase you pay for before a line is written. No six-week RFP process. We scope in a single call, assemble engineers pre-vetted through our four-stage vetting process at our Philippines development center, and have code shipping in the first week.
Scoping call
30 minutes. We learn what needs to be built, what is already in the codebase (if anything), what the first sprint should deliver, and what PHP specializations the project needs: Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, API, or a mix. We do not pitch on this call. We scope.
Team assembly
We pull 1-3 pre-vetted PHP engineers from the Philippines bench whose skills, seniority, and prior project experience match what the project requires. You see their full profiles and actual project history before the interview.
Technical interview
You interview candidates the way you would interview any senior hire: live system design, architecture questions, Laravel or Symfony depth, and PHP-specific technical questions. Pass on anyone you do not believe in. We keep looking.
Contracts and setup
One contract with Full Scale. We handle all employment, payroll, equipment, and HR logistics at our Philippines delivery center. Your engineer gets repo access, tool access, and sprint 1 is planned.
First delivery
Your engineer joins your standups, commits to your repo, and ships code in the first week. Our delivery team stays in the loop through ramp-up to make sure velocity does not stall. They own the work through launch and beyond.
Signing a contract is not the same as shipping software
Most PHP outsourcing failures are not engineering failures. They are delivery model failures. The fixed-bid agency model creates incentives that work against you: speed over quality, handoffs over ownership, scope control over outcomes. Staff augmentation realigns those incentives. Here are the six ways the agency model breaks down on real PHP projects.
Fixed-bid scope creep destroys PHP project budgets
Agencies win the bid on an optimistic estimate and recover their margin through change orders. Every requirement not in the original spec becomes a billable revision. By go-live, the fixed price has doubled and the relationship is adversarial. PHP projects are particularly exposed to this because requirements for content platforms and SaaS products evolve as the product gets in front of users.
The agency disappears after handoff
Fixed-bid PHP projects end at deployment. The engineers who built your Laravel or Symfony application move to the next bid. You own every production bug and architectural decision without the institutional knowledge of the people who made them. Post-launch support becomes a new contract negotiation.
No visibility until it is too late to change
Black-box delivery means you see the product at the end of a sprint cycle or, worse, at handoff. By the time you learn the architecture does not fit your use case, the codebase is already built around it. Staff augmentation keeps engineers in your repo and your standups from day one.
Speed incentives drive the wrong PHP architecture
Fixed-bid agencies are paid to ship fast, not right. That means fat controllers where service layers should be, raw SQL built by string concatenation where an ORM should be, and application-layer logic that belongs in the domain model. You inherit a PHP codebase optimized for handoff velocity, not long-term maintainability.
Engineer rotation breaks project continuity
Agencies staff projects with whoever is available, not whoever is best-matched. The developer who built your core Laravel auth module gets rotated to another engagement. New engineers read code they did not write for onboarding, and the velocity cliff arrives around sprint 8. Our Philippines-based engineers stay on your project.
Production failures become out of scope
Performance issues that surface under real load, security gaps that were not in the spec, edge cases nobody documented. Agencies classify these as new work. With staff augmentation, your engineers own what they shipped and have incentive to build it right the first time.
PHP expertise tuned to your industry
As a PHP development company that has been around for over a decade, we have placed dedicated PHP developers into nearly every industry that runs on the LAMP stack and its modern descendants. Domain knowledge cuts onboarding time in half, so we match developers to projects where they have already shipped real code.
SaaS & Scale-ups
B2B SaaS on Laravel is our home turf, with engineers who have shipped multi-tenant architecture, subscription billing with Stripe, role-based access, and white-label theming. They have worked on PHP-based SaaS at every scale, from seed to public companies.
From Laravel 11 SaaS builds to PHP 5 legacy migrations
Whether you want to hire Laravel developers for a greenfield SaaS build, hire Symfony engineers for an enterprise platform, hire WordPress developers for a publisher site, or take an offshore PHP development approach to a legacy CodeIgniter or Yii system, the bench covers every layer of the modern PHP stack. Pick what you need. We will match a PHP programmer fluent in it.
Hire dedicated PHP developers, two ways
Most clients start with a single dedicated PHP developer and grow into a full team. Either way, you get full-time engineers who sit on your standups, work your hours, and ship code against your roadmap. Both options are the staff augmentation model at the core: dedicated, long-term engineers embedded in your team rather than freelancers, shared resources, or a project shop on the side. See the full breakdown of how we hire dedicated PHP developers across every engagement we staff. When a project crosses PHP and a modern JavaScript frontend, you can also hire dedicated full-stack developers from the same bench.
Dedicated developer
Full-time, exclusive, sits on your standups.
- Full-time PHP engineer assigned only to your project
- Works your hours, your tools, your codebase
- Joins your standups, reports to your tech lead
- We handle payroll, HR, equipment, retention
- Two-week money-back guarantee
Dedicated team
Multiple engineers, embedded as a pod.
- 2-10 PHP engineers staffed together as one pod
- Optional QA, DevOps, and tech lead included
- Operates as a team inside your engineering org
- Scale up or down by a head with 30 days notice
- Account manager you can escalate to in the US
Dedicated PHP developers, starting at $35 an hour
That rate is fully loaded, covering a senior PHP engineer in the Philippines working full-time on your project, with payroll, benefits, HR, and equipment all handled by Full Scale. The same role hired locally in the US costs $130K to $170K a year. The math is what drives most of our clients to call.
- Full-time, dedicated PHP engineer
- Pre-vetted by senior PHP reviewers
- Works your hours, your tools, your codebase
- Payroll, HR, equipment, benefits handled by us
- US-based account manager you can escalate to
- Two-week money-back guarantee if it isn't a fit
Full Scale has made the Inc. 5000 five years in a row and is Great Place to Work certified. We have been doing this since 2018, and pricing isn't the only reason clients stay with our PHP development company, it's the easiest reason to call.
The reason offshore PHP works here
You can also hire dedicated developers in the Philippines across every other stack we staff, with the same vetting bar, retention numbers, and engagement model that PHP clients get.
English-fluent by default
The Philippines is the third-largest English-speaking country in the world. Standups, code reviews, and customer calls work the way they do with any US team member.
Real time-zone overlap
Most of our PHP engineers shift their hours toward the US business day, giving 3-4 hours of real-time overlap with East and West Coast teams, so decisions happen live during shared hours rather than crawling through 24-hour async handoffs.
Deep engineering talent pool
Cebu and Manila produce tens of thousands of CS and IT graduates a year, and PHP has been the default web language in the local market for two decades. Senior PHP engineers are not a rare hire here.
Cultural alignment with US teams
Filipino engineers grow up on US business norms, US TV, and US tech culture, so agile rituals, direct feedback, and collaborative workflows feel familiar from day one. These teams integrate fast rather than needing constant management.
Staff augmentation vs the other ways to get PHP software built
Every PHP delivery model has a different set of trade-offs. Fixed-bid agencies offer a contract; consultancies offer a proposal. Staff augmentation offers engineers who embed in your team and work under your direction from day one. Here is how those models compare on the things that actually determine whether a PHP project succeeds.
| Factor | Full Scale (staff aug) | Fixed-bid agency | Consultancy / SI | Build in-house |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first sprint | 7 days | 4-8 weeks | 6-12 weeks | 3-6 months |
| You control architecture decisions | ||||
| Visibility into work in progress | ||||
| Engineers dedicated full-time to your PHP project | ||||
| Scope flexibility when requirements change | ||||
| Budget predictability | ||||
| Engineers own what they ship post-launch | ||||
| You own all IP from day one | ||||
| Engineer continuity across the project | 93%+ retention | varies | low | varies |
| Fully-loaded cost vs US in-house team | ~40-50% | ~60-80% | ~100-150% | 100% |
Real PHP engineers, named and vetted
A sample of the PHP engineers on our team. These are real Full Scale developers working remotely from across the Philippines, and you'll meet candidates like them during your interview round.
A PHP developer who ships production work with PHP, Angular, and Next.js.
A senior PHP developer with 10 years of experience across PHP, Laravel, and ASP.NET.
A senior PHP developer with 12 years of experience across PHP, jQuery, and AngularJS.
A senior PHP developer with 19 years of experience across PHP, C#, and ASP.NET.
A PHP developer who ships production work with PHP, Angular, and AngularJS.
A PHP developer building with PHP, Laravel, and React.
The numbers behind a PHP staffing partner that actually works
From the people we actually staff teams for
Full Scale's development team was pivotal in elevating our facility management software. Their expertise turned complex challenges into seamless functionalities, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency.
With Full Scale's developers, we transformed the commercial real estate landscape. Their team's proficiency in agile development and proactive communication accelerated our product release.
Deeper guides to PHP development and architecture
Offshore PHP development
When offshoring PHP work is the right move, and how to do it well.
Outsource PHP development
How to outsource PHP development without losing control or quality.
Nearshore vs offshore
When each model wins, from a CEO who has run both.
Outsourcing vs offshoring
The distinction most CTOs get wrong, and why it matters.
What offshore development really costs
The real numbers behind offshore rates and total cost.
The ROI of offshore development
The math behind 50-70% development cost reductions.
Everything you wanted to know about PHP development services
PHP development services from engineers who have actually shipped PHP in production
30-minute discovery call with a PHP development company that delivers custom PHP, Laravel, Symfony, CodeIgniter, and legacy modernization through senior Filipino engineers. We will learn what you are building, walk you through the engineers on the bench, and you will meet candidates within a week. No pressure, no sales pitch.