Lumen 6 and the point where a micro-framework stops paying

The service that started as six endpoints now has a scheduler, three queue workers, two admin screens and four people working on it — and every one of those is something Lumen made you build.

signals that it has outgrown the micro-framework

  a scheduler, and something to run it
  templates — any HTML at all
  a queue with more than one job type
  three or more people working on it at once
  facades and Eloquent both switched on

the last one is decisive: at that point it is a smaller
Laravel with fewer features and the same dependencies.

Migrating from Lumen to Laravel is not dramatic — the container, the routing and most packages are shared — but it is a day nobody plans for and it happens under deadline pressure. Naming the threshold in the project README means the conversation happens before the deadline. The honest retrospective on the whole arc is that the performance argument was real in 2015 and had largely evaporated by now: PHP 7.3 with opcache made the framework overhead small enough that the decision is about features rather than speed.