What API development services do you offer?

We offer REST API development, GraphQL APIs, third-party API integration, Laravel API development, and API security implementation. We also provide DevOps services including AWS infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines.

Where are you based and do you work with clients across the UK?

We're based in Leeds, West Yorkshire, but we work with clients across the entire United Kingdom including London, Manchester, Birmingham, and beyond. We work remotely with businesses throughout Britain.

What technologies do you specialise in?

We specialise in Laravel and PHP for backend development, along with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, Node.js, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and CloudFlare. We also work with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

Do you provide ongoing support after project completion?

Yes, we offer ongoing support and maintenance packages to ensure your APIs and applications continue running smoothly. This includes monitoring, updates, security patches, and performance optimisation.

Cloudflare Acquires Astro - Why We're Excited

On 16 January 2026, Cloudflare announced it had acquired The Astro Technology Company, the team behind the Astro web framework. This is one of those acquisitions that genuinely has us excited, and not just because we think Astro is a brilliant framework. The combination of Cloudflare's infrastructure and Astro's approach to building for the web is a natural fit, and it signals good things for the future of content-driven development.

What is Astro?

If you haven't come across it yet, Astro is a web framework built around one simple idea: your website should ship as little JavaScript as possible. Most modern frameworks treat everything as an interactive application, bundling up large amounts of JavaScript and sending it all to the browser even when the vast majority of the page is static content. Astro flips that on its head.

By default, Astro renders your pages to static HTML on the server and sends zero JavaScript to the client. When you do need interactivity, say a dynamic form, a live search, or an interactive pricing calculator, you opt in using what Astro calls "islands". These islands are self-contained interactive components that hydrate independently, meaning only the parts of the page that actually need JavaScript will load it. The rest stays as fast, lightweight HTML.

The really clever part is that Astro is framework-agnostic. Those interactive islands can be built with React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, or even a mix of frameworks on the same page. For us, as a team that favours React, this is ideal. We can use React exactly where we need it without the overhead of shipping the entire React runtime for pages that are mostly content.

Why Cloudflare?

Cloudflare has been quietly building one of the most compelling platforms for web development. Their edge network spans over 300 cities globally, and products like Cloudflare Workers, Pages, R2 storage, and D1 databases give developers a full-stack platform that runs close to the end user. They've already been a long-time sponsor and supporter of Astro, so this acquisition feels less like a corporate land-grab and more like a formalisation of an existing relationship.

What makes this feel different from other tech acquisitions is Cloudflare's track record with open source. They've supported projects like TanStack and Hono without trying to lock them down or capture them. In the announcement, both companies were clear: Astro will remain open source, MIT-licensed, with its public roadmap and open governance model intact. Astro will continue to be platform-agnostic, meaning you can deploy to any hosting provider, not just Cloudflare.

Fred Schott, Astro's creator, put it well when he said that joining Cloudflare allows them to accelerate development and deliver at a much larger scale. With Cloudflare's resources behind them, the Astro team can focus on building rather than worrying about the commercial side of sustaining an open source project.

What This Means for Our Stack

We build APIs with Laravel. That is our bread and butter and it is not changing. But the frontend landscape matters to us too, especially when we're building content-driven websites and marketing pages for clients, or when we're building documentation and landing pages for API products.

Our preferred frontend tools are React and Next.js, and Astro complements that stack beautifully rather than competing with it. Next.js excels at building full interactive applications where most of the page needs client-side state management. Astro excels at content-heavy sites where performance and SEO are paramount, but you still want pockets of rich interactivity. The two serve different purposes, and having both in our toolkit gives us flexibility.

With Astro, we can build blazing-fast content sites that pull data from our Laravel APIs, render everything to static HTML at the edge, and only hydrate the specific React components that need to be interactive. That means better Core Web Vitals scores, better SEO performance, and a better experience for end users, particularly on slower connections or lower-powered devices.

We also work with CraftCMS, and we're already excited about Craft 6 adopting the Laravel framework. Combining a Craft-powered backend with an Astro frontend, all deployed to Cloudflare's edge network, is a seriously compelling architecture for content-driven projects.

Astro 6 is on the Horizon

The acquisition coincides with the first public beta of Astro 6, which brings some significant improvements. The local development server has been completely redesigned using the Vite Environments API, which means your development environment can now run in the same runtime as your deployment target. This closes the gap between what you see locally and what runs in production, which is a persistent pain point in web development.

Astro 6 also makes Live Content Collections stable, allowing developers to integrate dynamic data in real time without requiring a full rebuild. Content Security Policy support is built in, the APIs have been simplified, and Zod validation has been updated to version 4. These are practical, developer-focused improvements that make the framework more reliable and more pleasant to work with.

A Good Sign for the Open Web

There's always a nervousness when a large company acquires an open source project. Will they lock it down? Will they prioritise their own platform at the expense of the community? In this case, we're optimistic. Cloudflare's commitment to keeping Astro open source, platform-agnostic, and community-driven is backed by their track record, not just their words.

The broader trend of major companies investing in open source web tooling, with Figma acquiring Payload CMS, Anthropic acquiring Bun, and now Cloudflare acquiring Astro, suggests that the industry recognises the value of these tools and wants to ensure they have sustainable futures. That is good for all of us.

For us at The API Guys, this acquisition reinforces a technology direction we were already moving towards. We'll be writing more about Astro as we integrate it into our projects, and we're particularly keen to explore the combination of Laravel APIs, Astro frontends, and Cloudflare's edge platform. Watch this space.