You buy a Laravel developer either by the hour or for a closed scope - and the second option is far safer for a company. Hourly rates on the Polish market run roughly from several dozen to over two hundred PLN net per hour, depending on experience and on whether you are buying one person or a whole team. Project-based pricing works differently: you pay for the result, not for the time, so the risk of a slipped deadline sits with the person doing the work. On my side a typical fixed-bid build lands at 5,000-10,000 PLN net per stage, and you get the quote in writing before we start.
Below I break it into parts: what you are actually buying, what the pricing models are, what pushes the price up and how to check whether the offer on your table is honest.
What Laravel is and when you really need it
Laravel is a framework for building applications in PHP - a set of ready-made foundations (login, permissions, job queues, form handling, integrations) on which bespoke things are written. It is not a finished product like a store or a website. It is a tool for the situation where nothing off the shelf does what you need.
When Laravel makes sense:
- A B2B portal for business customers with individual prices, credit limits and order history
- Integrating systems that do not talk to each other - store, warehouse, accounting software, courier
- An internal application for sales, service or production, with its own document flow
- Complex pricing or booking logic that plugins cannot reproduce
When Laravel is overpaying: an ordinary company site, a blog, a simple store with a few dozen products. There an off-the-shelf solution does the same thing more cheaply, and upkeep comes out lower. I tell clients that outright at the diagnosis stage.
Hourly rates: what the brackets look like
The hourly rate depends mainly on experience and on how much responsibility the person takes on. The brackets below are a reference point from the Polish market, not a price list - rates shift from year to year and differ between cities and industries.
| Who | Rough rate net/h | What they are suited to |
|---|---|---|
| Junior | about 60-90 PLN | Small fixes under supervision, not for running a build alone |
| Mid | about 90-150 PLN | Extending an existing system to a written specification |
| Senior / freelancer with a portfolio | about 150-250 PLN | A whole build from analysis to sign-off, architectural decisions |
| Team (software house) | above senior rates plus overhead | Large projects with several people working in parallel |
Abroad the rates are several times higher - in Western Europe and the US they are counted in euros and dollars. That is why Polish Laravel developers often work for foreign markets, which pushes domestic rates up.
Important: a low hourly rate does not mean a low project cost. Someone at 80 PLN/h who needs three times as many hours and keeps returning to the same bug comes out more expensive than a senior at 200 PLN/h. Compare the total cost, not the rate. The same trap applies to the hourly rate of a WordPress developer.
Three pricing models and what hurts in each
| Model | How it works | Risk on your side |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly (time and material) | You pay for hours worked, scope can change | Open budget, hard to predict the end |
| Fixed bid for a scope | An agreed amount for a written scope, deadline and sign-off | The scope has to be described well before the start |
| Ongoing monthly arrangement | A pool of hours or maintenance of a working system | You also pay in months when little happens |
For a company ordering a system for the first time, the safest is a fixed bid for a closed scope. You know up front what you will pay, and any gap between the idea and the build surfaces during the agreement stage rather than on the invoice. I keep hourly billing for things that cannot be described up front: extending an existing system, experiments, work on something still being defined. A separate decision is whether you want an in-house developer or a contractor - for a single build, a permanent hire almost never stacks up.
What really decides the final price
The price of a Laravel build is a function of seven things. Ordered from the biggest cost driver down:
- The number of integrations. Every external system is a separate job: documentation, tests, error handling, edge cases. Integrating with accounting software or a wholesaler’s feed can cost more than the entire user interface.
- The complexity of permissions. A system where everyone sees the same thing is many times cheaper than one with roles, limits and visibility that depends on the customer.
- Data migration. Moving several tens of thousands of records out of a spreadsheet or an old system is always more work than it looks - data tends to be inconsistent and has to be cleaned.
- Performance requirements. A portal for ten people and a portal for a thousand concurrent users are two different projects with the same feature list.
- The state of what you already have. Writing into somebody else’s undocumented code costs more than starting from scratch.
- The interface. A ready-made admin template is cheap; a design cut to your process costs separately.
- Formalities. Invoices, KSeF (Poland’s mandatory e-invoicing system), JPK (the standardised sales and purchase ledger file every Polish VAT payer files monthly), digital accessibility - if the system is to handle them, that is a separate scope, not “a small extra while we are at it”.
If any of those points is unclear on your side, a quote from anyone will be guesswork. That is why I start with a conversation and a process map, and only then give a figure.
What a typical build costs
In practice I split the work into stages, so we do not start from one big number detached from any result. A single fixed-bid stage with me is usually 5,000-10,000 PLN net (Polish market rates), ends with a working piece of the system and a sign-off. Larger systems are assembled from several such stages, in the order that produces a result fastest.
An example split for a customer ordering portal:
- Stage 1: customer login, catalogue with their prices, cart
- Stage 2: order history, statuses, downloadable documents
- Stage 3: connection to the warehouse and the accounting system
- Stage 4: automations - notifications, reminders, reports
After each stage you can stop and check whether it works in your company before ordering the next one. More on the scopes themselves and on what goes into a system like this, I described in the pieces on what a B2B platform costs and on the portal for distributors and sales reps.
Costs nobody mentions at signing
The build is not the end of the spending. A Laravel application lives on a server, uses external services and needs updating. A realistic annual budget covers:
- A server stronger than ordinary shared hosting (the application needs its own environment, queues and scheduled jobs)
- External services - payment gateway, email delivery, SMS; each has its own price list and each of those changes
- Updates to the framework and libraries, so the system does not get stranded on a version nobody patches
- Incident response - somebody has to pick up the phone when the portal stops working on a Wednesday at 9am
The last two can be bought as ongoing maintenance. On my side that is from 1,000 PLN net per month on Basic, from 2,000 PLN on Pro and from 3,500 PLN on Premium, depending on response time and the scope of work included. The details are on the ongoing support page. If you would rather leave it to your own IT department, that is fine too - I hand over the documentation and the access, and that is that.
How to check an offer before you sign it
Before you accept any quote, ask four questions:
- What exactly is in the price, and what is not? A good proposal has a list of features and a list of exclusions. No exclusions is a promise of arguments later.
- Who owns the code when it is finished? The answer “you do” should be on paper, together with access to the repository and the server.
- What happens after sign-off? How long the fix period lasts, how bugs are reported and whether fixes are chargeable.
- Who will actually do the work? One person or a team, and are you talking to that person or to somebody who only sells.
Red flags: a quote given in five minutes with no questions about your process, no written scope, “we will nail that down as we go” as the answer to a price question, and a price that sits clearly below the rest of the market. That last one usually means somebody has not read the scope and will come back for more money halfway through.
Where we start if you want this priced
I start with a free diagnosis: a conversation about the process, a look at what you already have (a store, spreadsheets, an old system), and an honest answer on whether Laravel is needed here or whether extending the existing solution is enough. It happens that after that conversation I advise against a big build, because the problem can be solved with an integration for a fraction of the money.
If the job is larger, you get a fixed bid in writing before we start: scope, stages, dates and an amount per stage. I do not begin work without that document, because it is the only way both sides know what they are paying for. I do not promise specific business results - those depend on your market and your sales. I promise a working system, documented code and a sign-off matching what we agreed.
Frequently asked questions
What does a Laravel developer cost per hour in Poland? Market brackets run from several dozen PLN net per hour for beginners to over two hundred for experienced people who run a whole build on their own. Those are rough figures that change every year. On a one-off project it is worth asking for a price per scope rather than per hour anyway.
Is a freelancer or a company cheaper? A single person usually has a lower rate, because there is no structure to maintain, and communication is faster. A company gives you interchangeable people and throughput on large projects. On a system up to 10,000 PLN net per stage the price difference is usually clearly in favour of a single person.
Can I hire a Laravel developer part-time? Yes, it is a popular model when developing a working system - a fixed pool of hours per month, or a retainer covering maintenance and small changes. On a first build it makes less sense than paying for a closed scope, because you are paying for availability rather than for a result.
Is Laravel more expensive to maintain than WordPress? Usually yes, because a bespoke application needs a stronger server and a person who knows that specific code. In exchange you do not pay for plugins and you do not depend on somebody else’s updates. I compared the costs on the WordPress side in the piece on how much a WordPress developer costs.
Sitting on this yourself and unsure where to start? I speed up and repair existing sites and stores - Core Web Vitals, outages, the features that are missing. Tell me what is happening and you will get a concrete quote with a date.