We kept building the same admin panel. So we stopped.

Why we created it

We build our own products. Every one of them started the same way: two weeks of authentication, permissions, password resets and a settings page, before writing a single line of the thing we actually wanted to build.

The alternatives always came with something attached: a library, a runtime, a build step, a license. A framework brings an upgrade treadmill that breaks things every twelve months. A SaaS starter kit means renting your own foundation. Few of them survive two years of server updates untouched, and the ones that do tend to be rigid.

So we created PHPFoundry: a PHP admin panel you upload and use. No Composer, no npm, no framework. It runs on the same cheap hosting your clients already have, and it keeps running when the server updates PHP without asking you.

The test we hold it to

Upload it to a shared hosting account and have it work. That’s the whole specification. No build step, no composer install, no exotic PHP extension. There is a CLI, and it makes updates and maintenance easier — but nothing needs it to get started.

Email that works on day one

Transactional email is where most starter kits send you back to Composer. Here it works out of the box — plain SMTP, or an API provider such as Resend — and you pick one in the settings screen, not in a config file. Every message is logged, so a password reset that never arrived is something you can look up instead of guess about.

Some of it is already built

The addon system is not an empty folder with a specification. Two addons come with it and run on the same panel:

Billing — customers, products, plans with their limits, and subscriptions. Directory — listings with custom fields, media, locations, ad slots and a public front end you can theme. Both are working code you can read, copy and bend into whatever your project needs.

Built to be extended — including by AI

Zero dependencies has a side effect we didn’t plan for: an assistant can read the whole thing. There is no framework magic to explain, no dependency injection container to reason about, no generated code. It’s PHP you can point at and change.

That matters more than it used to. Plenty of people building real products today are not full-time developers — they work with an AI and they need a codebase it can actually follow.