Jason McCreary

Jason McCreary, known in the Laravel community as JMac, is an American developer best known as the creator of Laravel Shift, a service that automatically upgrades Laravel applications by opening a pull request with the code changes. He runs it as a solo business from Louisville, Kentucky, alongside books and courses for PHP developers.

McCreary had been writing PHP for over a decade and selling iOS apps when he gave a talk on upgrading to Laravel 5.1 at php[world] in 2015. Afterwards he asked Taylor Otwell, Laravel's creator, whether any upgrade scripts existed; Otwell said no but that he would use one. McCreary built a prototype at the conference hackathon, and launched Shift on December 23, 2015, charging $3 to $7 per upgrade. It made $80 over that Christmas.

Growth came from listening to customers and from the Laravel community on Twitter. After he spoke at Laracon in 2016, revenue jumped about tenfold, from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. He kept consulting, including contract work for Papa Johns, until October 2018, when he finally went full-time on Shift. A year later, after the Laravel 6 release, Shift hit a monthly high of $20,312, and it made $267,000 in 2020. In November 2021 he wrote that Shift had passed $1,000,000 in lifetime revenue after six years.

Shift is still a release-driven business, with spikes around every new Laravel version, and McCreary also maintains Blueprint, an open-source code generator for Laravel. He also wrote BaseCode, a field guide to writing more readable code, and its follow-up Base Laravel, and created the courses Getting Git, Confident Laravel and Fast Laravel. He still answers Shift's support emails himself and streams his work regularly.

McCreary is a textbook case of a niche, unglamorous developer tool built around one framework growing into a durable solo business.