How Much Does It Cost to Fix a Broken Laravel Application in Australia?
Honest pricing breakdown for Laravel rescue, maintenance, and upgrades in Australia. What factors drive cost, what you should expect to pay, and how to avoid being overcharged.
One of the first questions every business asks us is: "How much will this cost?" It's a completely fair question — and one that most development firms dodge with "it depends." We're going to give you a real answer.
Why pricing is hard to give without an audit
The honest answer is that Laravel rescue pricing genuinely does depend on the application. Two Laravel projects can look identical from the outside and have wildly different technical debt underneath. A 5-year-old e-commerce application and a 5-year-old internal tool might both be running Laravel 6, but one could take 2 weeks to rescue and the other could take 3 months.
That's why the first step is always an audit. You can't responsibly quote rescue work without understanding what you're rescuing.
What affects the cost?
1. How far out of date the Laravel version is
Going from Laravel 10 to 11 is a small job — often just a few days. Going from Laravel 5 to 11 means migrating through 6 major versions, each with breaking changes. The further back the version, the more work is involved.
2. Whether there are tests
Applications with no automated tests require manual verification of every change. This dramatically increases the time required and the risk involved. Adding a baseline test suite before the rescue work begins adds cost upfront but reduces it overall.
3. Package health
Abandoned packages need to be replaced. Sometimes there's a direct replacement available. Sometimes the functionality needs to be rebuilt from scratch. The number of abandoned packages and the complexity of replacing them has a big effect on the overall cost.
4. Codebase quality
A well-structured Laravel application with clear separation of concerns is easier to rescue than one where business logic is scattered across controllers, raw SQL queries are embedded throughout, and there's no consistent pattern anywhere. Both can be rescued — the latter just takes longer.
5. Scope of the rescue
Are you asking for a security patch and version upgrade? Or a full rebuild of a problem area? Or ongoing maintenance going forward? The scope of the engagement drives the cost.
Rough cost ranges (AUD)
Based on our experience with Australian Laravel projects:
- Security patch and dependency update (small app): $3,000–$8,000
- 1–2 version upgrade (medium app, no tests): $8,000–$20,000
- Multi-version migration (3+ jumps, medium app): $20,000–$60,000
- Full rescue (major version behind, complex app, no tests): $60,000–$150,000+
- Yearly maintenance retainer: from $3,500/year
These are rough ranges. The audit will give you a precise, fixed-price quote.
Our audit: AUD $7,000
Our Laravel Audit costs AUD $7,000 and takes 5 business days. You receive a written report covering the version status, code quality, security exposure, dependency health, and a prioritised fix plan with fixed pricing for the rescue work.
If you proceed with the rescue within 30 days, the $7,000 audit fee is credited against the cost of the work.
If you don't proceed, you keep the report and can use it to brief any other developer. You've lost nothing except the cost of knowing exactly what you've got.
What you should be wary of
- Anyone who quotes rescue work without doing an audit. They don't know what they're quoting. You'll get scope creep, surprises, and a final bill that looks nothing like the estimate.
- Hourly billing for rescue work. Hourly billing transfers all risk to you. If it takes longer than expected, you pay more. Fixed-price billing means the provider has to understand the scope before they start — which protects you.
- Offshore teams quoting suspiciously low. Laravel rescue work on inherited codebases requires deep experience. Junior developers and offshore teams cutting their teeth on your production application is not a risk worth taking for a lower quote.
The cost of doing nothing
This is the number most businesses don't calculate. Running an end-of-life Laravel application means:
- Known security vulnerabilities with no available patches
- Hosting providers who may stop supporting your PHP version
- Inability to integrate with modern APIs and services
- Rising cost of finding developers willing to work on very old stacks
- The risk of a catastrophic failure with no straightforward recovery path
The cost of rescue now is almost always less than the cost of a production incident later.
Is your Laravel project at risk?
Get a full written audit in 5 business days — version status, security exposure, dependencies, and a fixed-price plan to fix what matters.