How Bagisto Turned a Free Laravel E-Commerce Project Into $1M in Revenue

Who built it, and what they built

Saurav Pathak is the Chief Product Officer of Bagisto, an open-source e-commerce platform built on the Laravel framework. Beyond standard online stores, the platform supports marketplaces, point-of-sale setups, progressive web apps, and dropshipping, and it targets merchants of all sizes as well as developers and freelancers who build custom stores for clients.

The company is based in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India, started in October 2018, and has 47 employees with three cofounders. Over four years it has generated more than $1M in revenue, with $350K in annual recurring revenue across the past two years.

Where the idea came from

Pathak brought nearly seven years of experience across fintech and e-commerce in SaaS and open-source stacks. He works within Webkul, a company that had spent a decade building on major e-commerce platforms, where the team saw a gap between demand and supply for platform-driven e-commerce work.

The insight behind Bagisto was that developers working on any MVC framework should be able to build an e-commerce system without learning a whole new platform first. Someone fluent in Laravel could pick up Bagisto and ship a custom store, instead of starting from scratch or adapting to an unfamiliar system.

The team also believed newer approaches belonged at the center of e-commerce. They pointed to headless architecture and progressive web apps, noting that in parts of India with unreliable internet, offline-capable storefronts could matter for small and medium merchants.