Fortrabbit Alternative and Fortrabbit Pricing for PHP Agencies Running Many Client Apps

What is the best fortrabbit alternative?

For an agency or product team running many PHP apps, the best fortrabbit alternative is a server panel on servers you own, and DeployManage Growth at $129 a month covers 10 servers, 50 sites per server and 10 team members with zero downtime releases. For a freelancer with two or three small sites, the honest answer is to stay on fortrabbit, because nothing we sell beats $5.50 a month for a small Craft site.

The other names that come up in this search fit different buyers. Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 a month is the cheapest panel for Laravel shops comfortable on their own servers, and Ploi at $10 to $36 a month is close behind. Laravel Cloud suits teams who want no servers at all and accept usage billing. Platforms such as Heroku, Render and Railway run PHP through containers or buildpacks, which brings back the ephemeral disk problem that fortrabbit's persistent storage solved. If your apps write uploads to local disk, a VPS with a panel keeps that working with no code changes.

How much does fortrabbit cost?

fortrabbit has no platform fee; each app environment pays for the components it books, and a small production app with a database usually lands between $5 and $10 a month. Billing runs monthly in arrears with daily granularity, so a component booked for three days costs 3/30 of its monthly price. Every new app starts on a one week trial with no card, and by default the app is deleted when the trial ends unless a payment method is attached.

Two details change real invoices. Autoscaling is on by default for MySQL, storage and traffic, so a busy month can move an app into the next tier; PHP does not autoscale. And the step from the shared MySQL LG tier at $8 to the first dedicated tier, XL, is a jump to $60 a month, which is where data heavy apps tend to notice the bill.

fortrabbit vs your own servers, worked monthly bills

The table prices four real setups. fortrabbit uses the component sizes named in each row. The DeployManage column adds DigitalOcean Basic droplets at their current list prices ($12 for 2 GB, $24 for 4 GB, $48 for 8 GB) to the plan fee. Starter at $59 has no zero downtime releases, so rows that need them use Growth.

The crossover against fortrabbit sits at about 16 client sites of the row 3 size: sixteen at $14.50 is $232, against $225 for Growth on two 8 GB droplets. Laravel Forge is cheaper than both in every multi site row, and if price is the only question that is the panel to pick. DeployManage earns its higher fee with 10 seats on Growth, an exportable activity log across every client server, and the same release layout for Laravel, Craft, Statamic, Symfony and WordPress. Paid yearly, Growth is $64 a month, which moves the 20 site row to $160.

Is fortrabbit good for Laravel?

Yes, fortrabbit is a good fit for small Laravel apps: it has documented Laravel guides, persistent storage, SSH for artisan, and workers, Horizon and the scheduler run as jobs next to the app. The limits show up at the edges. PHP 8.2 or later is required on the current platform, Node is available during the build but cannot be installed at runtime, and the jailed shell rules out packages such as FFmpeg or a headless browser for PDF generation.

A Laravel app that only serves requests, sends mail through a provider and runs a few queues will be happy there. A Laravel app that renders PDFs with Browsershot, runs Meilisearch or Typesense locally, or needs Redis tuned for Horizon throughput is the kind that moves to its own server. That move is what DeployManage automates: provisioning, Supervisor, SSL and the release switch.

How to migrate from fortrabbit to your own server

Moving an app off fortrabbit takes four steps: provision a server, export the database over SSH, copy uploads, and deploy from git before switching DNS. fortrabbit documents database exports with mysqldump through an SSH tunnel, so the database comes out as a standard dump that imports into MySQL on the new server.

1. Provision a server in DeployManage with the same PHP version the app runs today.
2. Create the site, connect the repository and paste the environment variables from the fortrabbit dashboard, changing the database host to the new server.
3. Take a mysqldump through fortrabbit's SSH tunnel and import it. Copy storage or uploads folders with rsync or SFTP into the site's shared storage path.
4. Deploy, test on the server address, then move DNS. Remove the fortrabbit app once traffic has moved; billing is daily, so you pay only for the overlap.

For a Craft CMS site, the shared paths are the asset volumes and the storage folder; our Craft CMS deployment page lists the exact layout. Statamic sites keep content folders in git or shared storage, covered on the Statamic hosting page. If the app is a Laravel product rather than a client site, Laravel Cloud alternative compares the managed route you may also be weighing.

Who should stay on fortrabbit

Plenty of teams should. A freelancer with three brochure sites pays under $20 a month on fortrabbit and gets OS patching, PHP runtime updates and one support contact for both hosting and billing. Nobody on the team has to think about Ubuntu end of life or kernel reboots, which on your own server is your job, even with a panel doing the provisioning. fortrabbit also offers free team collaboration and billing handover to clients, which suits agencies that pass hosting costs straight through.

The switch makes sense when the monthly total, the jailed shell or the GitHub only deploys start to cost more than running servers. If none of those bite, keep the platform that is working.