Customer portals
Log in, see your account, do the thing you used to email us about. The most common request, and the most valuable.
Web application development
The web application your business needs that nobody sells.
Custom web applications and APIs for UK businesses: customer portals, internal systems, booking and billing platforms, SaaS products. Built in Laravel by engineers with over 20 years in software, led by a named technical lead, and owned by you outright.
What we build
The things off-the-shelf software can't quite do
If it is the process that makes your business yours, it probably deserves its own software.
Internal tools
The dashboard, the approvals flow, the ops screen that replaces four spreadsheets and a shared inbox.
Subscriptions and billing
Stripe done properly: plans, invoices, dunning, tax. We have built it enough times to know where it bites.
Integrations and APIs
Talk to the systems you already run. Clean APIs for the ones that need to talk to you.
Headless content
Marketing content edited by marketing, delivered by the app. We built our own CMS for exactly this.
AI features, sensibly
Where a model genuinely helps your users, we build it in, designed so it stores and reuses answers instead of paying for the same call twice.
Our own product
We built our own CMS. That's the standard we hold ourselves to.
Mojimoto is a headless CMS we built in Laravel because the ones we were using kept getting in the way. It has a delivery API, a write API, an MCP server, and SDKs for React, Vue, Nuxt, Next and Laravel. Real customers run real sites on it.
We mention it because it is the clearest example of how we build: a product with paying users, shipped by our own team working AI-first, with the boring parts (auth, billing, rate limits, audit logs) done properly.
- Laravel, Postgres, Stripe under the hood
- Typed SDKs across five frameworks
- Used on this website, right now
we eat our own cooking
How a build runs
Discover, design, build, grow. Then keep going.
Discover. Every build starts with a two-week discovery sprint. We map the process you are actually running, not the one on the org chart, agree what success looks like in numbers, and settle the scope and fixed price of the build.
Design. Screens you can click before we write the real thing. It is much cheaper to change a prototype than a database.
Build. Laravel on the back, Vue, React or Blade on the front, hosted where you want. Tests on everything, AI in the loop, a senior developer signing off. A named technical lead runs it from discovery to launch, and you see progress weekly, not at the end.
Grow. Launch is the start. Live products move onto Care, so the team that built it stays on to measure, fix and extend.
What it costs. The discovery sprint is £5,000. Builds then come in three sizes: Launch from £20,000, Scale from £38,000 and Platform from £65,000. You pay 30% at the start, 40% at beta and 30% at launch, and Care is £1,250 a month after that. All prices are ex VAT, and you own the code, the accounts and the data from day one.
Good questions
Things people ask about bespoke builds
Straight answers, no small print.
Laravel for the back end, with Vue, React or plain Blade on the front depending on what the product needs. Postgres or MySQL, Stripe for money, Laravel Cloud or your own infrastructure for hosting.
You do, from the first commit. It lives in your repository, on your accounts. If you walked away tomorrow you would have everything.
Fixed scope, fixed price, agreed before we start. Once it is live, ongoing work moves onto one of the monthly plans so there is never a surprise invoice.
Bespoke, not bloated
Got a process that deserves its own software?
From our clients
What our clients say
Incredible, it has changed our company for the better and we will be working with Your Ikigai long into the future.
Ikigai has been such a huge support and integral part of our journey, they've supported junior developers onboarding, supported us architecturally and designed a market leading brand. They've really helped accelerate our business.
Also from Ikigai
Other ways we can help
Growth partnership
Build, SEO, PPC and analytics as one monthly service, planned with you and led by us, with a report every month on what moved.
Find out moreMobile app development
iOS and Android apps, native where it counts, with the API and admin behind them built to the same standard as our web applications.
Find out moreDesign and branding
Logos, identity, graphic design, tone of voice and guidelines from our designers. A project of its own, or the start of a website or app.
Find out moreLaravel development
Laravel applications, Filament admin, APIs, migrations and Laravel developers for hire, from a UK agency that built its own CMS in Laravel.
Find out more