I face this situation all the time, and in most cases it depends on the client’s budget and goals. It’s important to clearly explain that a SaaS solution is not as fully customizable as building a solution in-house, and that relying on SaaS can lead to ongoing costs through paid features and add-ons.

At the same time, clients have the right to go to market as quickly as possible and at the lowest possible cost, in order to validate their idea, achieve stability, and start seeing real benefits from the website.

For this reason, I usually recommend a hybrid approach. Build the core functionality internally, while integrating third-party services wherever possible. With AI solutions such as Claude, this process becomes much easier and quicker, especially when it comes to integrating third-party services and accelerating time to market.

After a few months, you can analyze which features are actually being used and which ones come from paid services or SaaS tools, and then gradually rebuild or customize those features specifically for the client.

You can follow this https://laracasts.com/path

Well, good thing is it's not just me who feels he's falling behind (according to my LinkedIn feed); It's a generational thing.

I’ve felt since I started my programming journey that I need to learn every new tool, framework, and language in existence to stay relevant. But I wasn’t consistent with my learning (one day I’m learning Laravel, the next day I’m learning .NET) so I took too much time with all this inconsistency to fully grasp and understand what I’m actually learning.

So thank you, Jeffry, for this episode. I'm not actually alone :)

I agree with this, several months ago I stopped going onto social media (tech Twitter/X etc.) and weirdly I stopped feeling so "ugh I am so behind" - never really thought about the reason I stopped feeling that way, but this makes sense. Working through fundamentals on Laracasts at the moment and I have used a framework before understanding and your comments on fundamentals first makes me understand and see things in a whole different way ..also nah totally wise. :)