Dedicated developers · US · UK · Canada
Hire PHP Developers
Dedicated PHP, Laravel and legacy-PHP engineers in India for product teams in the US, UK and Canada. Salaried staff you interview yourself, four hours of daily overlap with EST, ten working days risk-free, and your IP assigned from the first commit.
- Ten working days risk-free
- Real tickets in your tracker. Walk away at the end and owe nothing.
- IP assigned on day one
- Yours on commit, not on final payment. An assignment clause, not a licence.
- NDA before repository access
- Yours or ours, signed before anyone joins your GitHub organisation.
- Four hours of EST overlap
- Standup at 9:00am your time, written handover before your morning.
- Replacement inside five days
- At no cost, with a paid week of overlap for handover.
- Thirty days’ notice to stop
- Month to month after the trial. No annual minimum, no exit fee.
3 developers free within four weeks
Engagement models
Four ways to hire a PHP developer
Pick by how much certainty you need. Every model is the same engineers, the same review standards and the same published rate.
Hourly
For a defined fix, an audit or overflow work. Billed in 15-minute blocks.
Priced on the rates pagePart-time
Eighty hours a month: a steady half-developer for a maintained product.
Priced on the rates pageDedicated
MOST CHOSENOne engineer, full time, on your standup and nobody else's.
Priced on the rates pagePod
Two developers, QA and a PM. We own delivery, you own the roadmap.
Priced on the rates pageStraight answer
When a dedicated PHP developer is the right call, and when it is not
Staff augmentation suits a particular shape of problem: you know roughly what needs building, you have someone who can answer questions, and the work will not run out in a month. A dedicated developer joins your standup, learns your codebase properly over the first fortnight, and by week three is closing tickets without asking how the deploy works. That compounding familiarity is the whole point, and it is why we price monthly rather than by the sprint.
It is the wrong call in two situations, and we will say so on the first call. If the work is genuinely fixed and finite, buy it hourly and stop when it is done. One integration, one upgrade, one audit: you should not be paying a monthly retainer for six weeks of work. And if nobody on your side has half an hour a day to answer questions, no arrangement survives that, ours included. A developer with no product context writes plausible code that solves the wrong problem.
The other thing worth being honest about: offshore does not remove management, it relocates it. What it removes is recruitment, payroll, notice periods and the twelve-week gap between deciding to hire and someone starting. You still need to decide what gets built. If you want a team that also decides that, you want project delivery rather than a developer added to yours, that is a different page and a different price.
Most of our clients arrive with a legacy PHP application that works, earns money, and frightens everybody. That is the case where a dedicated engineer pays for itself fastest, because the first month is spent on tests and documentation nobody has had time to write, and every month after that is cheaper than the one before.
If a two-day audit is the honest answer to your question, we will tell you that instead of quoting a retainer. It has cost us work and earned us more.
The alternatives
What you are actually choosing between
Marketplace and in-house figures are typical US mid-to-senior PHP ranges for 2026, including employer costs. Ours are the published rates.
Capabilities
What our PHP developers actually do
Eight things we are asked for most. If your problem is not on this list, describe it in one paragraph and we will tell you honestly whether it is us.
Custom PHP web application development
Greenfield builds on PHP 8.4 with a test suite, CI pipeline and written documentation from the first week, not bolted on before handover.
PHP 8.4Pest
GitHub Actions
Docker Legacy PHP 5.x to 8.4 upgrades
Static analysis first, then a branch-by-branch upgrade with the site staying live throughout.
Laravel application development
Multi-tenant SaaS, billing, queues and Filament panels on Laravel 12.
Laravel 12HorizonFilament 4 REST APIs and third-party integrations
Stripe, HubSpot, NetSuite, shipping and tax APIs, with retries, idempotency and a replay log.
StripeWebhooksOpenAPI CodeIgniter maintenance and migration
Keep CI3 patched and secure, or move it to Laravel one module at a time.
CodeIgniter 4 WordPress and WooCommerce engineering
Block themes built properly, headless front ends on a Laravel API, and stores that stay fast well past forty thousand products.
WordPress 6.8HPOSWP-CLIACF Pro Performance and database optimisation
Query profiling, indexing, caching layers and queue offloading, measured before and after, in writing.
RedisOctane Code audits and clean handover
A written report on an inherited codebase: risks, effort, and what to fix first. Yours to take elsewhere.
Something else?
Describe the problem in a paragraph. We will tell you honestly whether it is us, and who else to ask if it is not.
Tech stack
Current versions, not a wish list
What is in production for our clients this quarter. We will work in older versions too, most rescue jobs start there.
Language & frameworks
PHP 8.3 / 8.4 Laravel 11 / 12 
Livewire 3 Filament 4 CodeIgniter 4 
Symfony components Data & infrastructure
MySQL 8 
PostgreSQL 16 Redis Docker AWS · Hetzner · Forge GitHub Actions Quality & front end
Laravel Pint 
Vue 3 
Tailwind 4 
Alpine The engineers
The people who would be on your standup
Salaried staff, not contractors sourced after you sign. You interview them before anything is agreed.
Subscription billing, multi-tenant schemas and the money paths. Reviews every pull request on his team himself.
Laravel 12 Vue 3 PostgreSQL Strangler migrations off CodeIgniter: one router, both frameworks live, no big-bang rewrite.
CodeIgniter PHP 8.4 MySQL 8 Integrations specialist, Stripe, NetSuite and three shipping carriers, all idempotent.
Stripe Sanctum Queues Writes the tests nobody else wants to write, starting with the paths where a wrong number costs real money.
5 more engineers, with full profiles, shipped work and GitHub history. Meet the whole team →
How we work
What a PHP engagement includes by default
Not claims about work we have done. These are the things that are true on every PHP engagement from week one, and each is checkable while the trial is still running.
A small change shipped end to end before any feature work, because that is what proves access, review and deploy actually function.
Cleared before behaviour changes. Most legacy codebases have real bugs sitting at level 2 that nobody has hit yet.
On code with no suite we record what the current system does and use that as the reference, so a rewritten query that drifts is caught the same day.
Nobody merges their own work. That is a large part of what separates a published rate from a marketplace one.
IP assigned on commit rather than on final payment. There is no handover event because you already hold everything.
How to deploy it, how to roll it back, where the queue workers live. Written during the work rather than reconstructed at the end.
You do not have to take any of this on trust. The first ten working days are risk-free, every rate is published in full, and the work happens in your repository from the first commit.
How it works
From first email to a developer on your standup
Twelve working days end to end, and no money changes hands until you have seen the work.
- Day 0
Send us the problem
A repo link, a Jira export or three plain sentences. An engineer replies, not a salesperson, inside one business day.
- Day 1
Shortlist, with rates
Two or three profiles with real GitHub history, each carrying a rate, a seniority and the date they come free.
- Day 2
Interview them yourself
Twenty minutes with the person who will write the code. Say no as often as you like. There is no fee either way.
- Days 3-12
Ten days, risk-free
Real tickets in your tracker, standup at 9:00am ET, commits in your repo. Walk away at the end and owe nothing.
- Ongoing
Scale, hold or stop
Add a second developer at the same published rate, or give 30 days' notice. Repo, cloud accounts and IP stay yours.
Why India
Why hire PHP developers in India
A senior Laravel engineer in Pune costs roughly what a mid-level contractor costs in Austin, and PHP has been the backbone of Indian software services for twenty years: the depth of experience here is in legacy rescue work, which is exactly what most US buyers actually need.
YOUR WORKING DAY, AND OURS
- IP assignment on day one
- Everything written for you is yours on commit, not on final payment. Assignment clause, not a licence.
- NDA before repository access
- Yours or ours, signed before anyone is added to your GitHub organisation.
- Your jurisdiction, your paper
- We sign MSAs governed by Delaware, England and Wales, or Ontario law without argument.
- No lock-in, 30 days' notice
- Month to month after the trial. No annual minimum, no exit fee, documented handover included.
- Invoiced in USD or GBP, net 15
- Wire, ACH or card. One invoice a month, itemised by engineer and hours.
The first month
What the first thirty days actually look like
Onboarding is where most offshore arrangements are won or lost, so here is ours in the open. Week one is not billed.
Reading, not writing
The engineer reads the codebase, runs it locally, and writes down what they find confusing. You get that document at the end of the week, and it is usually the first honest map of your application anybody has made. Two or three small tickets go out to prove the deploy path works end to end. This week is not on your invoice.
First real tickets
Feature work begins against your tracker, at maybe sixty per cent of eventual pace, because every change still needs a question asked. Pull requests are small and frequent on purpose. If your review capacity is thin, this is the week to say so, and we will adjust the PR size rather than let work pile up unreviewed.
Pace, and the first argument
By now the engineer is closing tickets without asking how the deploy works, and will start pushing back on things. Expect a suggestion about tests, or a warning that the feature you asked for will be expensive because of a decision made three years ago. That pushback is the point of hiring somebody senior.
A written review, either way
We send a short assessment: what got done, what surprised us, what we would change about how the work reaches the engineer. You decide whether to continue, swap the person, or stop. Stopping at the end of the trial costs nothing and we do not ask why twice.
FAQ
Questions buyers ask before the first call
If yours is not here, email it. We publish the answer rather than saving it for a sales call.
How much does it cost to hire PHP developers in India?
Every seniority band and engagement model is published in full on our rates page, hourly, part-time, dedicated and pod, in USD, with no gate and no call required. We charge the same published rate to every client in every market.
How quickly can a PHP developer start?
Usually within five business days, and same-week for hourly work. 3 PHP engineers are free within four weeks and each profile above carries the date they come available.
Who owns the code and the IP?
You do, assigned from the first commit rather than on final payment. Work happens in your GitHub organisation and your cloud accounts, so there is nothing to hand over at the end.
What if the developer is not the right fit?
That is what the ten working days are for. Stop at the end of the trial and you owe nothing. After that we replace the engineer within five business days at no cost, with a paid week of overlap for handover.
How much timezone overlap do we get?
Four hours with New York, five and a half with London, and two with San Francisco. Standup is at 9:00am your time, and a written handover is in your inbox before your morning.
Are these contractors or your own staff?
Salaried employees, every one of them, hired before you asked. Nobody is sourced from a freelance marketplace after you sign, which is why we can publish names and availability dates at all.
Can you take over a codebase another agency built?
Most of our work starts that way. We begin with a paid two-day audit: a written report on risk, effort and what to fix first, and you are free to take that report elsewhere.
Do you work white-label for agencies?
Yes, and it is a third of what we do. We use your email address, join your Slack, sign your NDA, and never appear in front of your client.
What about security and access?
Company-managed laptops with disk encryption, SSO and 2FA on every service, least-privilege access, and immediate revocation on rotation. We are happy to complete your vendor security questionnaire.
Do you do fixed-price projects?
For well-defined scope, yes: a migration or an integration. For product work we recommend a dedicated engineer, because fixed price on a moving scope makes us both defensive about change requests.
Talk to an engineer
Tell us what needs building
You get a reply within one business day from someone who writes PHP for a living, with a named engineer, their rate and their start date. No discovery fee, no obligation.
Ten working days risk-free before you pay
NDA signed before repository access
Or book a 20-minute call at a time you pick
We never share your details, and we do not run a mailing list.