With 2025 coming to a close, we thought it would be nice to take a look back at the past 12 months to see what we accomplished.

You might think that Spatie is a big company because of the number of packages we have released over the years. In reality, however, we're a relatively small team. That's by design: our long-term goal has always been to have a close-knit group of people who know each other well and, because of that, can build great things together.

We decided to grow our team with five new members: Dries, Marceli, Nick, Sushanta, and Zuzana. With our team being slightly bigger in size, we are able to better serve our consultancy clients, while giving our own projects the time and love they need.

Improving Flare

It was a big year for Flare, with Performance Monitoring finally launching after a lengthy development process and a few months of running the beta version. Even though the landscape around us changed a lot since we started working on it, we pulled through and delivered something pretty great.

Performance monitoring allows you to track the performance of everything happening in your Laravel & PHP apps, like your HTTP routes, queued jobs, Artisan commands & queries, in great detail. Being big fans of Livewire, we also added support for measuring performance of individual Livewire components, as well.

Another cool new feature we added was an MCP server. This allows you to hook up your preferred AI Agent to Flare. This way your AI has all context it needs to diagnose and fix production and performance problems of your PHP, JavaScript and Laravel projects.

We're also in the early stages of adding a new big feature to Flare: logging. Send your application and server logs to Flare, and find, filter and search through them easily. And, just like performance monitoring, this will be a free addition to all existing Flare plans.

Polishing Mailcoach

For Mailcoach, 2025 has been very much a Snow Leopard year. Like that famous MacOS X release, we didn't focus on new features, but more on under-the-hood-improvements, performance fixes, and handling customer feedback. We published 70 releases of the spatie/laravel-mailcoach package, which underpins our hosted Mailcoach service.

If you contacted support, chances are high that you got an answer from Zuzana, who is now fully dedicated to handling the first line of support for Mailcoach.

Ray 3.0 is coming

This year, we also invested a lot of time in creating a new major version of our little debugging app called Ray. We're now in the final stretch of development, and you can help us out by downloading & testing the Ray 3.0 beta.

I’ve been using the beta for the past few months. It’s polished and a joy to use and look at. Dries, who leads building this new version, added subtle animations throughout the app. He and Séba implemented the new look and feel designed by Jimi. We're also adding more personality to Ray with themes, including this Matrix-inspired one.

Because our beta is already in such a good state, we're confident that we'll be able to launch the stable version of Ray 3.0 in January 2026.

On the open source front

Over the past few years, we created a great number of packages. In November, we reached the 2 billion downloads milestone, of which we're obviously very proud.

In 2025, we spent most of our time maintaining our existing collection of packages, but we also released a couple of new additions Laravel Backup Server. At the start of the year we decided to move the backup server package from our paid products to our free open source offerings. This package monitors your servers and ensures their contents are backed up. Under the hood it uses rsync to make sure identical files do not take up extra disk space, pretty neat!

One Time Passwords Using this package, you can securely create and consume one-time passwords. By default, a one-time password is a number of six digits long that will be sent via a mail notification. This notification can be extended so it can be sent via other channels, like SMS.

Passkeys This package provides a simple way to generate passkeys using a Livewire component. It also contains a Blade component that can authenticate your users using passkeys.

URL AI Transformer Using this package, you can transform URLs and their content using AI. Whether you want to extract structured data, generate summaries, create images, or apply custom AI transformations to web content - this package can do it.

Some fun projects

In addition to the packages, we also did a couple of projects in the open.

We publish a lot of knowledge at Spatie. Several team members run personal blogs, and each product has its own. To share broader web development insights, we launched a blog on spatie.be, where we’ve already published several solid articles.

This year was the year that AI Agents made a big impact on all of us. In order to let AI use our best practices, we shared our guidelines with AI. With this setup, Claude Code will produce code in a way that we (and probably many others) prefer.

Another fun project we did in 2025 was PHP Operators. On this mini-site you can explore well-known and obscure operators the PHP language has to offer. This web app is built with Laravel, Alpine.js, and Tailwind CSS. Content is stored in Markdown files and loaded with our sheets package. True to form, we open sourced the entire app.

Interesting links

Some things that stood out to our team this year.

Jimi | Pebble is back Not sponsored, but I’ve worn Pebble watches since the original orange model in 2013. When my Time Steel kicked the bucket this year, I immediately pre-ordered the new Time 2. Despite some early bumps, I admire Eric’s approach rebuilding Pebble with real respect for the community and aiming for hardware that can last another decade.

Freek | Let's talk about AI Art I'll remember 2025 as the year in which AI changed the way I code profoundly. I feel that as a community, we have only just started learning how we should use these technologies. I'm looking forward seeing which - hopefully best - practices will emerge.

Seb | Impact, agency, and taste If I were to share some thoughts on making a meaningful impact at work, Ben Kuhn's post would be it. His essay had me nodding yes, yes!, and YES! throughout, and it's written more eloquently than I ever could. Re-reading this article today, I'd put even more emphasis on taste. As AI tooling becomes more capable by the day, taste is a differentiator that can't be vibe-coded.

Alex | You no longer need JavaScript LLMs have inherited our collective bad habit of over-engineering. Ask them to build a simple UI and they’ll reach for (excellent) tools like Tailwind, Shadcn and Vite. This post is a good reminder that vanilla CSS and HTML can do a lot more than what we give them credit for. For my new year’s resolution I’m going to try to make vanilla CSS and HTML my first reflex again, starting with refactoring some tabbed views to CSS-only variants.

In closing

We're proud of the work we did in 2025, and heading into 2026 with Ray 3.0 ready to launch, logging coming to Flare, and plenty of other ideas.

We can't wait to show you what's next. Have a wonderful holiday season, and see you in the new year.

Freek, and all of us at Spatie