DeployManage, server management for any cloud
Laravel Cloud charges a plan fee plus metered usage, so the invoice moves with your traffic. DeployManage is the other model: one flat subscription, servers you own on the cloud provider of your choice, root SSH when you need it, and on the Growth plan the same push-to-deploy workflow with zero downtime releases and one-click rollback.
One-time demo, no credit card required.
Runs on any cloud: Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, Linode, OVHcloud and custom VPS.
| Server | Provider | Load |
|---|---|---|
|
web-01.prod
fsn1
|
Hetzner |
32%
|
|
web-02.prod
fsn1
|
Hetzner |
47%
|
|
db-01.prod
fra1
|
DigitalOcean |
18%
|
|
worker-01
eu-central-1
|
AWS |
61%
|
|
mail-01
gra
|
OVHcloud |
9%
|
The best Laravel Cloud alternative for a team that wants a bill it can predict is a deployment panel on servers you own: Laravel Forge for a solo developer, or DeployManage for teams that need seats and atomic releases across several servers. Laravel Cloud pricing starts at $5 per month on Starter, $20 on Growth and $200 on Business, and each plan is charged plus metered usage on top. The main alternatives are Laravel Forge at a flat $12 to $39 per month, and self-hosted panels like DeployManage that run on servers you own on any cloud. You trade Laravel Cloud's scale-to-zero and hands-off operations for a bill you can predict before the month starts and full root access to the machine. DeployManage is $59 a month for three servers, or $129 on Growth with zero downtime releases and rollback, so for one always-on app it usually costs more than Laravel Cloud or Forge; it fits teams and agencies running several production apps across more than one cloud.
One flat subscription plus whatever your cloud provider charges for the server. No metered compute, no per-request math, no invoice that jumps because a campaign went well. You can quote a client a hosting figure and still be right in six months.
The server belongs to your account at your provider. Install a PHP extension, tail a log at 2 a.m., attach a profiler, run a one-off script, change a kernel setting. Nothing is hidden behind a platform abstraction you cannot open.
Provision on Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, Linode, OVHcloud or a VPS you already pay for. Move between providers when pricing changes without rewriting your deploy pipeline or exporting your app from someone else's platform.
On Growth and Business, each release builds into its own directory while the current version keeps serving traffic, gets health-checked, then goes live in a single atomic symlink flip. If the new release misbehaves, roll back to the previous one in a click.
Databases, Redis, queue workers, scheduled jobs, SSL certificates, firewall rules and mailboxes are managed from the same panel. You are not stitching together four vendors to run one production application.
Your app runs on a standard Linux server with Nginx, PHP-FPM and MySQL or Postgres. If you ever stop paying us, the server keeps running and serving. That is a very different exit path from a managed platform that owns the infrastructure.
Add an API key for Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, Linode or OVHcloud, or point us at a VPS you already own. The server stays in your account and on your billing.
Pick a size and a region. Nginx, PHP, MySQL or Postgres, Redis, Supervisor, a firewall and automatic SSL are installed and hardened for you in a few minutes.
Connect GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, choose a branch, set environment variables. Migrate your database from Laravel Cloud and copy your env values across.
On Growth and Business, every push builds a new release, runs migrations, health-checks it and flips it live with no downtime. On Starter you deploy from the panel. Queue workers and the scheduler restart cleanly on the new code.
Pricing from each vendor's own pricing page. All three are legitimate choices and they are optimized for genuinely different teams. Here is the honest split.
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| What you get | DeployManage | Laravel Cloud | Laravel Forge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | $59/mo Starter (3 servers), $129 Growth, $299 Business; one-time demo first | Plan fee plus metered usage: $5 Starter, $20 Growth, $200 Business | Flat rate: $12 Hobby, $19 Growth, $39 Business, no free plan |
| Is the monthly bill predictable | Yes, subscription plus a fixed server price | No, it moves with compute, database and traffic usage | Yes, Forge states its pricing is not usage-based |
| Who owns the servers | You do, in your own cloud account | Laravel does, on dedicated AWS EC2 servers it manages | You do, in your own cloud account or Laravel VPS |
| Root SSH access | Yes | No, infrastructure is managed for you | Yes |
| Scale to zero when idle | No, the server runs continuously | Yes, the full stack sleeps and wakes in under 500ms | No, the server runs continuously |
| Autoscaling | Manual: resize or add servers yourself | Yes, horizontal autoscaling on CPU within limits you set | Manual: resize or add servers yourself |
| Zero downtime deployments | Yes on Growth and Business, with health checks and one-click rollback | Yes, built in | Yes, included in new subscriptions, single server only |
| Log retention | On your own server, for as long as you keep the files | 1 day Starter, 7 days Growth, 30 days Business | On your own server, for as long as you keep the files |
| Best for | Agencies and SaaS teams who want a predictable bill and control of the box | Teams who want zero infrastructure work and have spiky or seasonal traffic | Laravel teams happy with a single-server flat-rate workflow |
You quote a client a monthly hosting figure and you have to hold that number. Metered billing makes that quote a guess. A flat subscription plus a fixed server price is a figure you can put in a contract and forget about.
Scale to zero saves real money on an app that sleeps most of the month. It saves nothing on an app that is awake 24 hours a day with queue workers running constantly. At that shape, a right-sized server you own is usually the cheaper unit of compute, although the panel fee has to go on the same line.
Some contracts require you to name the machine your customer data sits on, control who can reach it, and keep logs longer than 30 days. Owning the server makes those answers straightforward instead of a support ticket.
Most real production setups have a WordPress marketing site, a Node service, a static docs build and a cron box alongside the Laravel app. A general server panel provisions all of them on the same infrastructure and the same dashboard.
Laravel Cloud uses a two-part price: a monthly plan fee, then metered usage on top of it. Our Laravel Cloud pricing breakdown runs the published per hour rates out to a real monthly bill. Every new organization gets $5 in usage credits and the first month on Starter is free. Here are the published plans, read from Laravel's own pricing page in October 2026.
| Plan | Monthly fee | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $5 plus usage | $5 in monthly usage credits, unlimited applications, scale-to-zero Flex compute, spending limits, 10 custom domains, 1 day log retention |
| Growth | $20 plus usage | Pro compute, autoscaling up to 10x replicas, unlimited preview environments, worker clusters, basic WAF, team roles, 50 custom domains, 7 day log retention |
| Business | $200 plus usage | Scheduled autoscaling, advanced WAF, largest compute sizes, custom roles, 250 custom domains, 30 day log retention |
| Enterprise | Custom | Private networking, dedicated compute, RDS and VPC peering on Private Cloud, 24/7 incident response |
The plan fee is the part you can plan around. The usage is the part you cannot, and it is where the surprises live: application compute while your app is awake, database compute and storage, cache, object storage and bandwidth. Laravel does give you real tools to contain this. You can set an organization-level monthly spending limit, you get notified at 50%, 80% and 100% of it, and compute pauses when you hit the ceiling rather than quietly billing past it.
Worth being precise about one thing, because a lot of comparison articles get it wrong: Laravel Cloud is not serverless. Laravel's own FAQ answers "Is Laravel Cloud serverless?" with "No. Laravel Cloud runs on dedicated AWS EC2 servers." Serverless Postgres is the name of one of its database products, not a description of the platform. Vapor is the serverless one, running on AWS Lambda, and Laravel now steers Vapor customers toward Cloud; if you are one of them and would rather own the server, the Laravel Vapor alternative page prices that route.
Laravel Cloud is a good product and for plenty of teams it is the right answer. The reasons people still leave cluster into four:
The bill is a variable, not a number. Metered usage is fair, and it is genuinely cheaper for an app that sleeps. It is also very hard to forecast. If you run an agency and quote hosting to clients, or you are a bootstrapped SaaS with a tight gross margin, "it depends on traffic" is a worse answer than a slightly higher fixed number.
You cannot get into the box. Managed infrastructure means the platform decides what is installed. If your app needs a specific PHP extension, a system binary like ffmpeg or wkhtmltopdf, a custom cron environment, or you just want to strace a process at 2 a.m., that access is not yours to grant.
The rest of the estate does not fit. Cloud runs Laravel and Symfony applications. If the same team also owns a WordPress marketing site, a Node worker and a couple of internal tools, you end up paying for and operating a second platform anyway.
Log retention and compliance. One day of logs on Starter and seven on Growth is fine for debugging a deploy. It is not fine when an auditor asks what happened six weeks ago. On your own server, retention is a disk-space decision you make.
The honest comparison is not "platform bad, VPS good." It is a question of shape. Two variables decide it: how many hours a month your application is genuinely awake, and how much engineering time you want to spend on servers.
Usage-based pricing wins decisively when your app sleeps. A staging environment, an internal tool used during business hours, a client demo, a seasonal app: these spend most of the month idle, scale to zero, and cost close to the plan fee. Paying for a server that idles 700 hours a month to serve 40 hours of traffic is money on the floor.
Flat pricing wins when the app is awake. A production SaaS with real customers, queue workers processing jobs around the clock, a scheduler firing every minute and a database that can never sleep is awake 730 hours a month. At that shape you are paying metered rates for continuous compute, and a right-sized server on Hetzner or DigitalOcean is the cheaper unit of compute. Whether the total is cheaper depends on the panel. With Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 a month it usually is. With DeployManage at $59 for three servers, or $129 on Growth with zero downtime releases and rollback, a single always-on app often costs more than on Cloud: a $24 droplet plus Starter is $83 against about $77 on Cloud for the same app with its database and cache. The math turns when several apps or client projects share one panel fee.
The second variable matters just as much and is easy to undercount. Managed infrastructure buys back the hours you would otherwise spend on kernel updates, certificate renewals, firewall rules and the 3 a.m. page when a disk fills. If your team is two people shipping features, those hours are expensive and Laravel Cloud is genuinely worth its premium; we price both sides of that call in is Laravel Cloud worth it. If you already have someone comfortable in a terminal, a panel that automates provisioning and deploys captures most of that value at a fixed price.
One practical habit regardless of which side you land on: put a spend alert on the account. Usage-based infrastructure is much less stressful when something tells you the moment a bill starts trending past its budget rather than at the end of the cycle. Laravel Cloud's built-in spending limits do this well within the platform.
A comparison page that only lists the other side's weaknesses is not useful, so here is the fair version. Moving to servers you own costs you real things.
If those things matter more to you than a predictable invoice and root access, stay on Cloud. That is a legitimate answer and we would rather you get it right than switch and regret it.
A migration off a managed platform is mostly a database move and a DNS cutover. Plan for an afternoon, not a weekend.
Once you are on your own server with DeployManage Growth or Business, deployments work the same way they did: push to a branch and a new release is built, health-checked and switched in atomically. If you want the mechanics in detail, read how zero downtime deployment works and what makes database migrations safe to run mid-deploy.
If you are migrating off Laravel Vapor, you have two real destinations: Laravel Cloud, which Laravel recommends and documents a migration path to, or a server panel on your own cloud account, which replaces per request billing with a flat monthly bill. Laravel has not announced an end date for Vapor, and the Vapor dashboard still works, but Laravel publishes an official Vapor to Cloud migration guide and is steering new projects to Cloud.
Choose Laravel Cloud if your app idles for long stretches, you want Laravel to keep running the infrastructure, and your team is happy with a platform you cannot SSH into. Choose your own servers if your Vapor bill is mostly steady traffic, if the private database on Vapor added a NAT gateway at roughly $32 a month on top of the $39 plan, or if your team wants Horizon, Supervisor workers and a local disk that survives deploys. The second route is the one this page prices; the Laravel Vapor alternative page runs the worked Vapor bills, and deploy Laravel to AWS covers staying on AWS with plain EC2 instead of Lambda.
The migration itself follows the same steps as leaving Cloud above: stand up the server, copy every environment variable Vapor injected (queue, cache and storage settings are the usual misses), move the database, keep S3 for uploads if you already use it, and cut DNS over once a release checks out.
Short version, so you can stop reading and go build something.
For a side-by-side of the two first-party Laravel options specifically, see Laravel Cloud vs Forge. If you are still mapping the field, the best server management panel roundup compares six of them honestly, including where each one loses. Running Symfony rather than Laravel? Laravel Cloud hosts Symfony apps too, and our Upsun pricing breakdown prices both platforms against deploying Symfony to your own servers.
Ready to stop managing servers by hand? DeployManage provisions, deploys and monitors your fleet from one dashboard.
Get startedIt depends on what pushed you off Cloud. If you want flat pricing and still want Laravel's own tooling, Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 per month is the closest swap. If you want a predictable bill plus root access and support for non-Laravel apps across several cloud providers, a self-hosted panel like DeployManage, Ploi or RunCloud fits better. If you want managed infrastructure with different billing, Cloudways is the usual comparison.
Laravel Cloud costs $5 per month on Starter, $20 on Growth and $200 on Business, and every plan is charged plus metered usage on top of that fee. Enterprise pricing is custom. New organizations get $5 in monthly usage credits and the first month on Starter is free. Your actual bill depends on how many hours your app, database, cache and workers are awake.
Migrate to Laravel Cloud if your app idles often and you want Laravel to run the infrastructure. Move to your own servers with a panel if your traffic is steady, your Vapor bill includes a NAT gateway for a private database, or you want SSH and Supervisor workers. Laravel has not announced a Vapor end date.
No, Laravel Cloud is not free, but it has a free entry point. Every new organization gets $5 in usage credits each month and the first month on the Starter plan is free. After that Starter is $5 per month plus usage. A very small app that sleeps most of the time can stay close to the credit allowance, but there is no permanently free production tier.
It depends almost entirely on how many hours your app is awake. For an app that idles most of the month, scale to zero makes Laravel Cloud cheap, often just the plan fee. For a production app with queue workers and a database running 24 hours a day, metered compute adds up and a right-sized server you own is cheaper compute. With a low-cost panel such as Forge the total is usually lower; DeployManage at $59 to $129 a month pays off across several apps rather than one.
Laravel Cloud is worth it when engineering time costs you more than infrastructure does. If your team is small, you would rather ship features than patch servers, and your traffic is spiky, the premium buys back real hours. It is worth less if you already have someone comfortable with a terminal, your traffic is steady, or you need a fixed number to quote clients. Our worked bills run from $5 for a sleeping internal tool to $168 for a busy app with a worker.
No. Laravel's own documentation answers this directly: Laravel Cloud runs on dedicated AWS EC2 servers rather than serverless functions, which is what gives it predictable performance. Serverless Postgres is the name of one of its database products, not a description of the platform. Laravel Vapor is the serverless option, running on AWS Lambda.
Yes. Laravel Cloud runs on dedicated AWS EC2 servers that Laravel provisions and manages for you, and it recommends locating any external database in the same AWS region as your Cloud resources. Enterprise customers on Private Cloud can use AWS products directly, including RDS, Aurora, DSQL and ElastiCache, along with VPC peering.
No. Laravel Cloud manages the underlying infrastructure, so you interact with it through the dashboard, the API and a commands interface that runs artisan tasks rather than through root SSH. If you need to install system packages, attach a profiler or debug at the OS level, you need a server you own, which is the main practical reason teams move to a self-hosted panel.
Yes, and it is usually an afternoon of work. Provision the new server and deploy from the same repository, copy every environment variable Cloud was injecting for you, dump and restore the database, re-point object storage, then lower your DNS TTL and cut over during a quiet window. Keep the Cloud environment paid for a week afterward so rolling back stays easy.
Yes. Zero downtime deployment is a deployment pattern, not a platform feature. Any panel that builds each release into its own directory, health-checks it, then flips a symlink atomically gives you the same result on a server you own. DeployManage does this on every push on the Growth ($129 a month) and Business plans, and keeps previous releases on disk so rollback is a single click.
Yes. Laravel publishes an interactive calculator with four scenario presets, and it lets you vary awake hours, region and resource sizes. It is worth running before you migrate, but add the workers and the database yourself. Those meters are separate from app compute and they are the lines most estimates leave out.
The database is billed apart from your app. Laravel MySQL comes in fixed monthly sizes from $5.50 (Flex 512 MB) and $11 (Flex 1 GB) plus $0.10 per GB of storage. Serverless Postgres bills $0.106 per compute unit hour while awake, $0.50 per GB month of storage and $0.25 per GB month of recovery history.
More than most people expect, because scale to zero stops helping. A Pro instance with 1 vCPU and 4 GB never sleeps and is capped at $32 a month, since always on compute bills at most 28 days. Add the $20 Growth fee, a MySQL Flex 2 GB database with 20 GB of storage ($24) and a 250 MB Valkey cache ($6), take off the $5 usage credit, and our worked production bill is $77. The same app on a $24 droplet is $36 to $63 with Forge, $83 with DeployManage Starter or $153 on Growth, so for one always on app Cloud and DeployManage land close together.
Connect the cloud provider you already use, provision a server, and ship your first deploy in minutes. One-time demo, no credit card required.