Building Orbit: Kawach Technology's Own Real-Time Project Management Platform

Most teams don't lose track of work because they lack a tool — they lose track of it because they're using three or four tools at once. A task gets assigned in a chat thread, a deadline lives in someone's calendar app, and the actual status update only exists in somebody's memory until the next stand-up. Every one of those handoffs is a place where a task quietly falls through the cracks.

Kawach Technology sees this exact problem from the client side constantly — teams asking us to build internal tools because their existing project software feels like it's fighting them rather than helping them. Rather than just describing that capability in a sales pitch, we decided to build a real product that solves it, and use it ourselves: Orbit, a project board where updates sync in real time, so nothing gets lost in a chat thread or forgotten in someone's inbox.

Building it also meant confronting a second, more technical challenge: most "real-time" project tools aren't actually real-time — they poll for updates every few seconds, or require a manual refresh. Making Orbit's sync genuinely instant, at a price point small teams and freelancers could actually afford, meant real architectural decisions, not just a marketing claim.

We built Orbit on Laravel 12, using Laravel Reverb — Laravel's own WebSocket broadcasting server — as the backbone for real-time sync, rather than a polling-based "refresh every few seconds" approach. That decision is why a card move, a comment, or an edit shows up on a teammate's screen in under a second: the change is pushed the moment it happens, not fetched on the next poll cycle.

On top of that real-time core, we built the features a team actually needs day to day: drag-and-drop boards and cards, an Inbox for capturing tasks the instant they come up, checklists with progress bars, comments with emoji reactions, and file attachments with cover images. Premium workspaces add Calendar, Timeline, Table, Dashboard, and Map views of the same underlying data — so a manager can see a timeline while an individual contributor works the board view, both looking at the same live data.

To solve the "automation shouldn't need a separate tool" problem, we built Pilot — Orbit's own trigger-condition-action automation engine, directly inside the product. And to solve the "sharing progress with outsiders" problem, we built read-only public board links that need no login at all — useful for exactly the kind of client-visibility use case Kawach's own client work runs into constantly.

Billing runs on Stripe across four tiers (Free, Standard, Premium, Enterprise), with role-based access via Spatie's laravel-permission package splitting workspace members into Admins (who manage billing, invites, and see every board) and Participants (who only see boards they're added to). The Free plan is deliberately generous — unlimited cards, up to 10 boards, no credit card required — because we wanted small teams and freelancers to be able to actually run their real work on it, not just trial it.

One of Orbit's actual users summed up the result better than our own marketing copy could: "We closed four other tabs the week we switched. Everything that used to live in a spreadsheet now just lives on a board people actually open." — Maya Kessler, Head of Ops at Northwind Labs, an Orbit customer.