Laravel Cloud

What Is Laravel Cloud?

Laravel Cloud is a fully managed platform-as-a-service for deploying Laravel applications, built and operated by the Laravel team itself. It launched on February 24, 2025, alongside Laravel 12, and sits in a different category from the team's two older tools: Forge (which provisions VPS servers you still manage) and Vapor (which runs your app as serverless functions on AWS Lambda). Cloud is the team's answer to the question of what a zero-ops Laravel hosting product would look like if they controlled the full stack.

Under the hood, Laravel Cloud runs on Amazon EC2 using a containerized, horizontally scalable architecture. You connect a GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket repository, configure environment variables, and push. The platform handles the build, replica management, load balancing, SSL provisioning, DDoS protection, and database provisioning without requiring an AWS account or any server knowledge on your end. Deployments take under 60 seconds from push to live URL, with zero-downtime rolling updates built in.

The platform is explicitly Laravel-optimized. Queue workers, the task scheduler, Horizon, and managed databases all work as first-class features rather than bolt-ons. This specificity is both its biggest strength and its most meaningful constraint: if your project is a Laravel application, almost everything you need is native; if it is anything else, this is not the right platform.

Key Features

• Auto-scaling with hibernation: Set a replica ceiling and Cloud scales up on CPU demand, then scales back down, including all the way to zero during idle periods. You pay only for active compute time.
• Git-connected deployments: Push to a branch and it deploys. Pull request preview environments are available on Growth and above, each with its own URL suitable for client review or QA.
• Queue workers and background jobs: Workers are configured in the same deployment manifest as your web replicas. They scale independently, support Horizon, and run as persistent processes rather than cron-triggered functions.
• Task scheduler: Laravel's built-in scheduler runs natively without needing a cron entry on an external server.
• Managed databases: One-click MySQL, serverless Postgres (Neon-powered, auto-scaling), and Valkey cache. Compute and database run in the same region by default.
• Multi-environment support: Staging, production, and feature environments each get their own config, secrets, and domain, with environment-specific autoscaling rules on Business and above.
• Built-in observability: HTTP access logs, application logs, deploy history, and basic performance metrics are in the dashboard. No third-party plugin required to see what your app is doing.
• SOC 2 Type 2 compliant: Relevant for enterprise and healthcare clients with compliance requirements.

Pricing

Laravel Cloud uses usage-based pricing with three named plans:

Starter - No monthly fee. You get $5 in free credit with no credit card required to start. After that, you pay only for what you use. Compute starts at roughly $4/month for a Flex 1 vCPU/256 MB instance with hibernation enabled. Custom domains are not supported on the free sandbox tier; the $20 Growth plan unlocks them. Starter is limited to a single replica, making it appropriate for dev environments and low-traffic apps.

Growth - $20/month plus usage. Unlocks autoscaling up to 10 replicas, preview environments, worker clusters, and a basic web application firewall. Managed MySQL and Postgres are available. A typical pre-scale startup app (flexible compute + MySQL + Redis/Valkey) runs approximately $16-25/month on top of the plan fee.

Business - $200/month plus usage. Unlimited autoscaling, scheduled autoscaling (scale up before a known traffic event), teams and RBAC, SAML/SCIM, advanced WAF, and private networking. This tier is aimed at applications with genuine traffic variability or enterprise security requirements.

Enterprise - Custom pricing with dedicated infrastructure, volume discounts, and white-glove support.

Data transfer is $0.10/GB across all plans, and object storage is $0.02/GB/month. The main bill-shock risk is outbound bandwidth on high-traffic sites or large file uploads, not compute. Budget $5-10/month for a small Statamic site; $20-60/month for a production web app at modest scale.

Our Experience

We started using Laravel Cloud at Lucky Media recently, and the onboarding experience lives up to the promise. We went from signing up to a deployed Laravel application with a connected database in under 10 minutes, with no SSH, no Nginx config, and no server sizing decisions to make. For the kind of Laravel projects we run on behalf of clients, that time-to-live reduction is real and material.

What has stood out most is the auto-scaling behavior during traffic spikes. Projects that previously needed either an oversized Forge server (wasting money 95% of the time) or manual intervention during peak events now handle variability automatically. The hibernation feature is genuinely useful for staging environments: they sleep when idle, so you are not paying $20+/month for a server that gets hit twice a day during review cycles.

The platform is young, and there are rough edges. The monitoring dashboard is functional but not deep, and we are currently routing production logs to an external service for anything requiring alerting or retention. The Growth plan's $20/month base fee is a meaningful jump from the Starter tier and prices out some small client sites that do not need autoscaling. But for the class of projects where elastic Laravel hosting matters, the developer experience is the best we have seen.

When Lucky Media Recommends Laravel Cloud

We reach for Laravel Cloud when:

• The project is a Laravel API, Statamic site, or full-stack Laravel app with variable traffic
• The client needs auto-scaling but does not have a DevOps budget or team
• Queue workers and scheduled jobs are core to the application, not afterthoughts
• The team wants zero-downtime deployments and preview environments without managing CI/CD pipelines
• Speed-to-production matters and infrastructure setup time is a constraint
• The project will scale and we want horizontal elasticity without migrating later

We would suggest alternatives when:

• The project includes Node.js services, Python workers, or any non-Laravel backend component that needs to co-locate on the same platform
• The client requires full SSH access, custom PHP extensions, or non-standard server configuration
• Traffic is flat and predictable and cost optimization is the primary concern
• The stack includes a headless frontend on Vercel or Netlify and only the Laravel API needs hosting
• The client is on a strict enterprise cloud agreement (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cannot route workloads to a third-party PaaS

faq

How is Laravel Cloud different from Laravel Forge?

Laravel Forge provisions and manages VPS servers on providers like DigitalOcean, AWS, or Hetzner. You still own the server, configure PHP, manage Nginx, and handle OS updates. Laravel Cloud is a fully managed PaaS where there are no servers to touch at all. You connect a Git repo and Cloud handles builds, replicas, load balancing, SSL, and scaling automatically. Forge gives you more control and lower cost for predictable traffic; Cloud gives you less ops work and elastic scaling on demand.

How is Laravel Cloud different from Laravel Vapor?

Both are fully managed, but the architecture is different. Vapor runs your app as serverless functions on AWS Lambda, which means near-infinite scaling but cold starts, AWS account requirements, and a steeper learning curve around Lambda constraints. Laravel Cloud runs your app in containers on EC2 with horizontal autoscaling, which behaves more like a traditional long-running server. There are no cold start penalties, persistent connections work normally, and you do not need an AWS account.

Does Laravel Cloud support queue workers and scheduled tasks?

Yes, and this is one of its strongest selling points. Queue workers, background processes, and the Laravel task scheduler are all first-class citizens on the platform. You configure them directly in the dashboard or deployment config without writing custom server scripts. Workers scale independently of web replicas, so a traffic spike does not starve your job queue.

Is Laravel Cloud free?

Laravel Cloud has no monthly base fee on its Starter plan - you only pay for what you use, with $5 in free credit included when you sign up (no credit card required). A small app with hibernation enabled can run for roughly $4-7/month. Custom domains require the Growth plan at $20/month plus usage. The Growth plan is where most production projects land once they need autoscaling, preview environments, and a custom domain. There is no fully free production tier, but the Starter pay-as-you-go model is the most accessible entry point of any managed Laravel platform.

Does Laravel Cloud run on AWS?

Yes. Laravel Cloud runs on Amazon EC2 under the hood, using a containerized architecture with horizontal autoscaling. This is different from Laravel Vapor, which runs on AWS Lambda (serverless functions). Cloud's EC2-based containers behave like traditional long-running servers: no cold starts, persistent database connections, and no Lambda runtime constraints. You do not need your own AWS account - the infrastructure is fully managed by the Laravel team on your behalf.