Rambling

Make a list of the top things Laravel will give you over CodeIgniter. If those things are important, go with Laravel. If the only thing you can come up with is "Laravel is the new hot framework" then I'd probably stick with CodeIgniter.

Write good code and it probably won't take you much time to port it to another framework in the future if you need to.

When your idea takes off and becomes the next Facebook or Twitter and you are forced to move to a more robust server platform to handle the enormous amount of requests, if you were going to move to another platform other than CodeIgniter, it would probably be Phalcon since it is faster, not Laravel which is slower: http://systemsarchitect.net/performance-...rameworks/ But at that point you can probably just kick back on your island and let your team of programmers make those decisions.