Hi @scottsuhy,
For decentralized metadata then you can use IPFS. If you know the metadata for all the tokens at time of deployment, you can deploy a directory of JSON files to IPFS, and then use ipfs://qmhash/
as your baseURI and then the token URI will be the concatenation of the baseURI and the tokenID.
As for a pinning service, I thought you could use Pinata through a web interface to upload and pin items.
I am not familiar with Laravel.
Glad to hear that you are enjoying the community. Feel free to answer other peoples questions to help us grow the community.