Building a multi-tenant LMS for 5,000+ students

Context

Each tutor wanted their own branded academy — custom domain, courses, subscriptions, and live classes — without waiting on engineering to spin up infrastructure per customer. The platform had to feel bespoke to every tenant while running from one codebase.

Constraints

• Strict tenant isolation — no tenant could ever see another's students, revenue, or content.
• Seven payment gateways across regions (PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay, Cashfree, Instamojo, PayUMoney, Flutterwave), each with its own webhook and reconciliation model.
• Live class scheduling integrated with Zoom, tied to subscription entitlements.

Approach

• Tenant-scoped data model with a shared schema and enforced tenant keys at the query layer, so isolation was structural rather than convention.
• A gateway abstraction normalized seven providers behind one billing interface, with webhooks reconciled into a single subscription state machine.
• Zoom API integration provisioned meetings on demand and gated access by subscription tier.

Architecture

A single Laravel application resolves the tenant from the request, scopes every query to it, and drives a Vue SPA. Billing and Zoom live behind provider-agnostic service interfaces.

Results

• 5,000+ students served across independently branded academies.
• Seven gateways unified behind one subscription lifecycle.
• Self-serve onboarding — tutors launched academies without engineering involvement.

What I'd do differently

I'd extract the gateway abstraction into a standalone package from day one; it was reusable well beyond this product and we recognized that only late.