Within the past seven years, we have helped dozens of founding teams build SaaS MVPs and develop them further to find product-market fit and growth. 

We have repeatedly observed that minimizing time to market for MVPs is of paramount importance for the eventual success of startups. Building rapidly and launching quickly allows founding teams to iterate over the product faster. And that is the only way one can turn a SaaS MVP into software people use daily to solve their hard-pressing problems.

The high speed of development has become even more critical now. The looming economic downturn and a more restrictive capital environment leave startup founders with no option but to use their runway as efficiently as humanly possible for product development.

Over the years, our tech team has implemented the best software craft practices that helped us increase our development velocity and deliver scalable and flexible software. However, we still would not have been able to minimize the time-to-market for MVPs to this extent without the Laravel ecosystem. As an official Laravel partner agency, we might be biased, but still, we can freely argue that Laravel is the best stack for building SaaS products.

Besides the ease of development, huge community, robust architecture, and high flexibility, the Laravel ecosystem offers third-party packages that can shortcut the initial weeks of development for SaaS products and cut down the SaaS development costs.
They provide ready-made or half-baked features essential for most SaaS products like multi-tenancy, registration/authentication, user management, admin panel, billing, etc.

Below, we discuss the Laravel packages we regularly use to deliver SaaS MVPs in record low times.

Tenancy for Laravel

Most of the SaaS platforms are multi-tenant by nature. Multi-tenancy is the ability to provide your service to multiple users (tenants: teams, companies, etc.) from a single hosted application instance instead of deploying the application separately for each user.

Forge, Envoyer, and Spark are examples of multi-tenant platforms you may already use, as are Slack, Hubspot, Stripe, and Google Workspace. These are all multi-tenant apps, as your data is separated and protected.

If you need to support the multi-tenant architecture with your application, then Tenancy for Laravel is a perfect package.

Tenancy for Laravel makes your Laravel application multi-tenant aware out of the box. It offers automatic data separation between tenants (single and multi-database), support for automatic configuration of tenant subdomains, easy tenant impersonation, and other essential features for any multi-tenant application. Without using Tenancy for Laravel, your development team would need weeks to build those features.

Laravel Spark

The ability to receive and process payments is another essential feature of SaaS applications. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s also a pain in the ass to custom develop. And that is where Laravel Spark saves the day. 

Laravel Spark, built on top of Laravel Cashier, enables users to subscribe to monthly or yearly subscription plans, monitor their payments, modify their subscription services, and get invoices from the billing portal. It also creates templates of how payments should be processed. So if you are going to integrate payment options into your product, Spark might be the easiest solution.

Laravel Socialite

Another essential Laravel package to mention is Laravel Socialite. When creating a SaaS product and don't want to spend development resources to build authorization flows for authenticating with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, Socialite is the way to go. 

Nowadays, many applications do not even have traditional authorization systems, and they entrust the heavy lifting of that system to the OAuth services. Similarly, users also seem to prefer the OAuth way of authorization too. So if you want to streamline configuring that flow for users, Socialite does just that. 

Laravel Jetstream / Laravel Fortify

Laravel Jetstream is a package created by Laravel. It is an ideal way to start working on your laravel app for several reasons. First of all, Jetstream implements login, registration, email verification, two-factor authentication, session management using Laravel Sanctum, and other additional team management tools for building the application.

It is a package that provides two frontend stack options, Livewire and Inertia.js. They both offer an efficient, decent ground for developing your application; 

Under the hood, Laravel Jetstream is powered by Laravel Fortify - a front-end agnostic, "headless" authentication backend for Laravel. So if you want complete flexibility on the frontend side, using the backend controllers and scaffolding for Laravel authentication provided by Fortify might be the best way to go.

Laravel Nova

Next up, Laravel Nova is a stunning administrative interface for Laravel projects offering a complete CRUD interface for the Eloquent models and ultimately saving significant time for developers. Moreover, it is simple to set up and extend with custom features when needed. 

Some of the essential features of Laravel Nova include Resource Management, Actions, Filters, Lenses, Metrics, Cards, Authorization, Custom Fields, and Scout search integration.

Conclusion

We think it’s fair to say that if you are building a SaaS startup, you can achieve unparalleled development speed with Laravel and its vast ecosystem. The packages discussed above allow your development team to entirely focus on the core application business logic and build the software on top of a solid foundation.

If you choose Laravel as your main technology, it might also be beneficial to research Laravel partner agencies that are fluently versed in it. On that note, you can see how we work with startups here.