Dev Log: 2026-07-04

TL;DR Two Laravel backends started serving Flutter apps on the same day — an events platform (auth, orders, offline check-in) and a helpdesk product (ops mode for agents). gatherhub-web moved to plans-only pricing with a comparison matrix driven by one data file. A hardening pass: payment-safe queues, gateway reconciliation, one heavyweight dependency dropped. Two mobile APIs in one day Coincidence, but a useful one: two products I'm building both needed their Laravel backends to serve mobile apps this week. The events platform got the full foundation — token auth (login/refresh/logout/me), participant orders, mobile payment with status polling, push-device registration, and an offline-first staff check-in flow. That last one is the interesting bit; I wrote it up as its own post. The helpdesk product went the other way: its API was client-only, and today it became role-aware. The same endpoints now serve ops agents working tickets from their phones, with abilities deciding what each role sees. One API surface, two personas, no duplicated /admin routes. The lesson that repeated in both: API Resources are the contract. The moment a mobile dev consumes your endpoint, every field you accidentally leak becomes a field you can't remove. Plans-only pricing (public) gatherhub-web , the Next.js marketing site, dropped à-la-carte feature pricing for three plans and gained a plan comparison matrix. Everything renders from a single plans.ts — the matrix, the pricing cards, the enterprise page — so the marketing site can't drift from what's actually sold. A pricing page is a contract too; it deserves a single source of truth as much as your API does. Hardening pass Change Why Bulk email blasts isolated to their own queue one big send must never delay a payment webhook Reconciliation command for stuck pending orders webhooks fail silently; polling the gateway is the safety net maatwebsite/excel → spatie/simple-excel for exports streams rows instead of building sheets in memory, s