Laravel raised money and now injects ads directly into your agent

Two years ago, Laravel raised a $57M Series A from Accel – an unusual move for an open source web framework. By contrast, Ruby on Rails is backed by a foundation that launched with about $1M from sponsors like Shopify and GitHub. Django runs on a nonprofit with a budget under $300K/year.

Now, it seems, Laravel needs to turn the money taps on. One way to 'create shareholder value' is to operate a commercial service that gives people the best and fastest way to deploy and scale production Laravel applications. If they did that, and wrote about it, probably people would notice and use it. Over time it would be recommended by search engines and agents, and it would make money. It's a sensible strategy and exactly the one they are using with Laravel Cloud.

A shortcut to the same result is to build a mediocre commercial offering that claims to be the best and fastest way to deploy and scale production Laravel applications. They could hire a lot of marketing people to astroturf reddit and other communities, and suggest Laravel Cloud loudly to anyone who is willing to listen. The quarterly numbers would look great, until trust was slowly eroded and the community moved on to other frameworks and products. See Being 'good at business' can be bad for Business.

I'm not a Laravel developer and don't generally use PHP apart from one small side project where Claude takes care of the coding for me anyway. I've never tried Laravel Cloud so I don't know whether it fits into either of the descriptions above. But some Laravel developers I know and trust pointed out this PR in Laravel Boost, an official MIT licensed library to help agents use Laravel effectively. The PR introduces a change to suggest to all agents that they should use Laravel Cloud to deploy projects, and it smells like enshittification to me.

Users are already complaining that this change 'poisons' their agents to try to default to using Laravel Cloud even for existing projects where this is not relevant, but Taylor, the creator and CEO of Laravel decided that as the deployment platform 'supports the development of Laravel' that this user-reported harm is not too important as long as this change helps the commercial line go up and to the right.

Interestingly, the first version of this addition also mentioned alternatives:

Laravel can be deployed using Nginx, FrankenPHP, Laravel Forge, but Laravel Cloud is the fastest way to deploy and scale Laravel applications

But Taylor changed this to mention only Laravel Cloud:

Laravel can be deployed using Laravel Cloud, which is the fastest way to deploy and scale production Laravel applications.

Did Laravel need to do this?

Above, I made the point that some commercial products are driven by quality (which builds true community support) and some are driven by big marketing departments. My first thought was that if the powers that be are trying to force-feed Laravel Cloud promotional material to agents, then it probably indicates that the agents are not huge fans of Laravel Cloud without this tactic.

I was surprised that actually Laravel Cloud comes highly recommended already! Look at ChatGPT and Claude Code singing its praises without any nudging.

This makes the enshittification more surprising. If agents hate your commercial arm but love your open source community arm, then it (from a business person's perspective) makes sense to sacrifice some community love in return for cold hard cash. But if the commercial side is already doing well, then the risks of upsetting your community seem higher in return for the benefit?

Do we let people feed ads to our agents?

This is quite a small commercial nudge and I'm guessing some people will find this to be completely fair game for Laravel's monetization strategy. But how we advertise to agents is still TBA and it's interesting to start talking about this now already. Are we OK with this? How soon will we need agent-ad-block? When banner ads started appearing everywhere, ad blockers were a natural reaction – they were annoying and in our face. But if this form of advertising directly to our agents takes off, it might be a lot more discreet. Tech people will (hopefully) be watching PRs to MIT licensed repositories and alerting communities when stuff like this happens, but for many others their agents will just recommend some products over others when asked, and sometimes that will be merit driven and sometimes it won't be.