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- Laracon US 2025 Surprises, Laravel Idea Plugin is FREE, Max MRR: Your growth ceiling, Claude Code vs. Cursor & more
Laracon US 2025 Surprises, Laravel Idea Plugin is FREE, Max MRR: Your growth ceiling, Claude Code vs. Cursor & more
Ahmad
August 03, 2025
Hey Makers 👋
Laracon US 2025 just wrapped up, and it delivered a wave of surprises for the community. From major tooling updates to exciting platform features, this year’s keynote was packed with announcements that are already shaking things up.
One highlight you’ll definitely want to take advantage of: Laravel Idea is now completely free for all PhpStorm users. No more licenses, no more limits—just powerful Laravel coding tools at your fingertips.
Let’s dive deeper into more details! 👇
Laracon US 2025 Wrap up
☁️ Laravel Cloud Updates
MySQL Support is Now GA:
Fully hosted, production-ready with daily backups.
Support for large compute/storage, read replicas, high-availability, and PITR coming soon.
New Pricing (Aug 12):
More predictable billing with renamed plans:
Starter: Free, supports custom domains.
Growth: From $20/month, includes Preview Environments and more.
Business: High performance, advanced networking.
Autoscaling for Queues (Dev Preview):
New Queue Clusters auto-adjust workers based on real-time queue latency.
Preview Environments:
Spin up isolated, production-like previews for every PR.
Auto-delete on merge/close, supports custom deploy steps.
Starter Kits in the Cloud:
Deploy from Laravel’s official templates (Livewire, Vue, React) in minutes, no repo required.
Coming Soon: WebSocket clusters for Laravel Reverb support.
🔧 Laravel Forge Reimagined
New UI: Built with TypeScript, Inertia, Vue. Sleek, fast, dark mode included.
Zero-Downtime Deployments: Out-of-the-box.
Laravel VPS: One-click server provisioning.
Hosted Domains: Share apps instantly via on-forge.com links.
Nuxt & Next.js Support
Healthchecks, Heartbeats, Metrics
Shared SSH Sessions, Role-based Access, New API
💡 Laravel 12 Improvements
AI-Powered Tools (Coming Soon):
Laravel Boost: AI dev assistant with Laravel-curated rules.
MCP SDK: Foundation for Laravel’s AI ecosystem.
Broadcasting Enhancements:
New
install:broadcastingcommand.useStreamhook for real-time apps in React/Vue.
New Dev Tools (Coming Soon):
<Form>Component for Inertia.Wayfinder+++: Auto-generates TS/JS types from backend definitions.
Ranger: Scans your app and generates DTOs, types, docs, etc.
📊 Laravel Nightwatch Upgrades
Deeper Laravel-native Observability:
Unified logs, traces, performance metrics in one tool.
Now with Slack Alerts and Light Mode.
Better Pricing:
50% more events in all plans (including Free).
Lower overage costs.
Volume-based pricing coming soon.
From SaaSykit
Livewire v4 brings a significant shift in how components are structured and used, introducing a new view-first approach that allows you to define both your PHP logic and Blade markup in a single, streamlined file. It’s a cleaner, more intuitive way to build components that reduces friction and boosts maintainability.
There’s a moment in every Laravel developer’s journey when they wonder:
“Should I ditch Eloquent and just use raw queries or switch to something like Doctrine?”
Maybe you’re debugging a slow query. Maybe you’ve fallen into the N+1 trap for the fifth time. Or maybe you’re just trying to prove you’re “serious” about performance. It’s tempting to think Eloquent is the problem.
From the Community
Starting July 30, 2025, JetBrains is making Laravel Idea free for PhpStorm users. If you already have the Laravel Idea plugin installed, you get full access to all plugin features at no extra cost.
Claude Code is Anthropic's official CLI tool that helps developers write better code by providing AI-powered assistance directly in your terminal. It can understand and apply coding standards, making it perfect for maintaining consistency across your Laravel projects.
Livewire v3 is vulnerable to an RCE (Remote Command Execution) during component property update hydration in specific scenarios. ⚠️ Update your Livewire ASAP! ⚠️
Nuno Maduro was the second speaker at Laracon US 2025 on Tuesday, unveiling new features for the upcoming Pest v4.0. When we wrote about Nuno's Pest 3 talk at Laracon US in 2024, users had installed Pest over 18 million times. A year later, Pest has been installed around 39 million times!
Imagine two users trying to update the same record at the exact same time. If your app isn’t handling this properly, one update might overwrite the other, leading to incorrect results. This issue is called a race condition, and it can cause unexpected bugs.
Laravel's measurement utilities provide developers with precise timing capabilities for code evaluation and optimization. These tools eliminate guesswork when comparing different implementation approaches and identifying performance bottlenecks.
Laravel's shallow resource routing eliminates unnecessary URL complexity while maintaining logical relationships between parent and child resources. This architectural approach streamlines API endpoints by removing redundant parent identifiers where they provide no additional value.
Most tutorials on the internet as well as other formal or informal education, teach developers how to build projects with the CRUD mindset, which is highly technical and focuses on data manipulation, similar to what Excel was invented to do and has been doing its job for decades now.
All about SaaS
Your company will stop growing sooner than you think. The “Max MRR” metric predicts revenue plateaus based on churn and new revenue.
“My design philosophy has always been that you should design something for someone. It's hard — impossible even — to design something really good for everyone,” says Karri Saarinen.
That credo has also proven to be a successful strategy for finding extreme product-market fit. Saarinen has built Linear to impress one very particular someone: himself. And it turns out there’s a massive market of folks just like him — IC product builders itching for a better way to track their work than the incumbent tools can provide.
Our brains tend to prioritize time-sensitive tasks, even when they’re less important than other tasks on our to-do lists.
And even when the deadline is merely imagined.
Researchers asked participants to choose between two identical tasks.
One would earn them five Hershey’s Kisses (high reward); the other, just three (low reward).
Despite pouring a record-breaking amount of cash into US-based AI startups in the first half of 2025, some of the tech industry’s most bullish backers are now starting to change their tune or even exit the field altogether — and the money isn’t necessarily coming with them.
“If you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.” – Ray Kroc, co-founder of McDonalds
“The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” — John Russell, Harley Davidson
“Make something people want.” – YC
Videos
Keep building, keep rocking! 🤘