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Laravel 12.27 & .28, WebSockets Beat Polling Every Time, Let AI Interact with Your App via MCP, Bootstrapping vs Fundraising & more

Author

Ahmad
September 14, 2025

Hey Makers 👋

Laravel keeps up its forward pace with two new releases: 12.27 and 12.28, adding more refinements and developer-friendly features. 🚀

On our side, SaaSykit just got a quality-of-life boost: you can now let users checkout zero-price one-time products without needing to enter payment details—perfect for free add-ons, downloads, or limited promos. 🎉

With September in full swing, it’s the perfect time to ship new ideas. If you’ve been thinking about launching your own SaaS, SaaSykit has your back. Grab a SaaSykit license and turn that idea into something real.

Let’s dive into the updates! 👇
Laravel 12.27 & 12.28

  • Str::plural() Now Supports Prepending Count
    A new prependCount flag makes it easier to output both the count and pluralized word in one call. 

{{-- Before --}}
{{ $products->count() . ' ' . Str::plural('item', $products->count()) }}

{{-- After --}}
{{ Str::plural('item', $products->count(), prependCount: true) }}

  • SQS Fair Queue Support
    Laravel now supports Amazon SQS FIFO queue message group IDs, allowing developers to take advantage of fair queueing. 

ProcessInvoice::dispatch($invoice)
    ->onGroup("client-{$invoice->client_id}");

  • Pretty JSON with Options
    The prettyJson() helper now accepts additional encoding flags for more flexibility. 

$settings->prettyJson(['lang' => '日本語'], JSON_UNESCAPED_UNICODE);

  • Enum Support in countBy and groupBy
    Collections now handle enums as keys when using countBy() or groupBy(), automatically converting them to strings or integers. 

collect([
    ['role' => UserType::Admin],
    ['role' => UserType::Member],
    ['role' => UserType::Member],
])
    ->countBy('role')
    ->all(); // [1 => 1, 2 => 2]

From SaaSykit

If you’ve ever built a chat feature, a live dashboard, or a notification system, chances are you started with polling. It’s the classic hack: the frontend keeps asking the backend, “Anything new yet? How about now? Now?”

It works, sort of. But it’s also like trying to hold a conversation by repeatedly poking someone in the shoulder until they finally answer.

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We, as a human, do this all the time in our day-to-day lives.

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If your app ingests data from users (webhooks or similar), then it’s important not to miss any of that data.

This is actually a bit scary. We need, like, a lot of uptime! The typical way to increase uptime smells like “scaling” and often feels like expensive premature optimization. How do we do this!?

All about SaaS

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You are fighting against biology and decades of existing behavior. You can’t willpower or white knuckle yourself to success. We need equally powerful forces on our side:

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I’ll start where it started: Gmail, midnight, me looking up from the fluorescent screen to the sky outside my window—dark but open, a few thin clouds drifting past the treetops, the kind of depth that reminds you there’s air beyond the glass. By contrast, the inbox on my screen looked like a lab: white tiles, hard light, rows of cells, sterile and devoid of life.

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Nowadays, it’s tough to tell good advice from useless ones. Everyone has something to say about some area of your life, and with social media blasting you with what you should do every minute of the day, it’s easier to sit and do nothing while feeling paralysed.


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