Laravel Cloud Pricing and Plans With a Calculator You Can Run

How much does Laravel Cloud cost per month?

Laravel Cloud costs the plan fee plus whatever your app burns. The plan fee is $5 a month on Starter, $20 on Growth and $200 on Business, and Enterprise is quoted. Every one of those plans includes $5 of monthly usage credit, and the first month on Starter is free. Usage is billed per second while resources are awake, and each always on compute, MySQL and cache resource is capped at 28 days' worth of billing in a month.

That structure makes a single sticker price impossible, so here is the arithmetic instead. The four scenarios below use Laravel's own published US East rates and monthly caps, read on 16 October 2026. They are our calculation from Laravel's rate card, not prices Laravel quotes as packages.

Read the first and last rows together, because they are the whole story. The same platform bills $5 and $168 depending mostly on one variable: how many hours of the month your app has to be awake. The $5 credit is subtracted from usage, so the totals above already account for it. Laravel's own estimator lands in the same place: its always on production preset comes out at about $176.

Laravel also publishes an interactive estimator on its pricing page with four scenario presets. Use it to sanity check your own numbers, but do the multiplication yourself for the worker and database too, because those are the lines people forget.

Is Laravel Cloud free?

No, Laravel Cloud has no permanently free plan. The cheapest tier is Starter at $5 a month plus metered usage. What Laravel Cloud does offer is a free first month on Starter, which the pricing documentation describes as a 30 day trial, and a $5 monthly usage credit included on every plan including Starter. Growth, Business and Enterprise have no trial at all.

That $5 usage credit is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes a very small application effectively cost only the plan fee. A Flex 512MB container runs at $0.00893 an hour and never more than $6 a month, so an environment that scales to zero overnight and runs a few hundred hours a month can sit inside the credit entirely. The moment you add a database, a queue and a second environment, you are past it.

What free actually covers

• Free for one month: the Starter plan, on a first subscription only.
• Free every month: $5 of usage credit on every plan.
• Never free: the plan fee itself past month one, compute beyond the credit, database storage ($0.10 per GB-month on MySQL, $0.50 on Serverless Postgres), and queue operations at $1 per million.

If a genuinely free tier is what you are after, the self hosted platforms are the honest answer rather than Laravel Cloud. We compare that whole category on our Coolify alternative page.

Laravel Cloud compute pricing per hour

Compute is quoted per second in the Laravel Cloud docs, with a monthly cap: no replica is billed for more than 28 days (672 hours) in a billing cycle. Converted to an hourly rate, the US East rate card looks like this.

Two things in that table matter more than the rest. First, Flex is the only class that scales to zero, which is why the difference between Flex and Pro is much bigger than the rate difference suggests: moving to Pro raises the rate and removes the discount you were getting from sleeping. Second, the cap makes an always on app predictable: a Flex 1 GB app that never sleeps costs $12, not 730 hours times the hourly rate. Dedicated compute is now an Enterprise feature with quoted pricing.

Data transfer is included per compute size, from 50 GB on Flex 512 MB to 800 GB on Pro 8 vCPU, and traffic beyond the allowance costs $0.10 per GB. Every plan also includes 1,000 GB of edge data transfer.

Laravel Cloud database, cache and queue pricing

The database bills on a meter separate from your app. Laravel Cloud offers Laravel MySQL in fixed sizes and Serverless Postgres powered by Neon. Cache is Valkey. Queues are metered by operation.

For an app that is awake around the clock, MySQL is the cheaper database by a wide margin: a 1 GB MySQL instance is $11 a month, while a single Postgres compute unit that never sleeps is about $77. Postgres wins for apps that sleep, because its compute stops billing on its own timer, which is why the tiny app in the first table pays cents for its database.

The line that surprises people is queue operations. An operation is not a job. Dispatching, starting and deleting a successful job each count, long jobs add visibility extensions, and every queue carries a polling baseline of about $0.13 a month. Managed queues also do not support Horizon, so a Horizon app runs its own always on worker instead; our Laravel Horizon hosting page prices that setup.

Is Laravel Cloud cheaper than running your own server?

It depends on awake hours, and the crossover is sharper than most comparisons admit. Below is the same four scenarios priced against a comparable server you rent yourself. DigitalOcean Basic droplet prices were verified at $6 for 1 GiB, $12 for 2 GiB, $24 for 4 GiB and $48 for 8 GiB.

Be honest about what the droplet column does not include. There is no managed database, no CDN, no WAF, no autoscaling and no scale to zero. You are buying raw capacity and taking on the operations. A panel closes most of that gap for a flat fee by handling provisioning, certificates, firewall rules, cron, queue workers under Supervisor and atomic zero downtime releases, but it will not autoscale you through a traffic spike the way a managed platform does. On DeployManage, atomic releases and one-click rollback are on Growth at $129 a month, so price the plan you would actually use. That fee makes sense for teams running several production apps, where a failed deploy costs more than the panel, and rarely for a single small app.

The genuinely useful conclusion is the shape of the curve, not a winner. Laravel Cloud is cheapest when your app is asleep and most expensive when it never sleeps. A fixed price server is the opposite: it costs the same at 4 hours and 730 hours. Work out which side of that curve your app sits on and the decision usually makes itself. Our own breakdown of what a Laravel VPS actually costs runs the fixed price side of this in detail.

What Laravel Cloud pricing does not buy you

Cost is only half a hosting decision. These are the limits that are structural rather than priced, and they are the reason some teams pay more elsewhere on purpose.

• No root. Laravel Cloud is a managed platform. You do not get a shell on the machine, you cannot install an arbitrary system package, and you cannot run software the platform does not offer. That is the trade the platform is making on your behalf.
• No mailboxes on your own domains. There is no per domain mailbox or forwarder management. If a client needs mail on their own domain you are buying that separately, which is a real line item people forget when comparing to a panel that includes it.
• Postgres, not MySQL. The managed option documented is Serverless Postgres 17. Teams on MySQL should confirm their path before migrating rather than after.
• Region changes the rate card. Every figure on this page is US East. The Asia Pacific and EU regions run higher for identical sizes.
• Some rates are not published. FIFO queue pricing, bandwidth overage and Reverb are not given as figures on the public pages. That is fine for a hobby project and a genuine problem for a budget you have to defend.

Set a spending limit on day one whatever you decide. Laravel Cloud supports a monthly cap with alerts, and compute pauses automatically when you hit it. On a usage billed platform that setting is not optional housekeeping, it is the difference between a surprise and an outage you chose.

How to estimate your Laravel Cloud bill before you migrate

Do this on paper before you move anything. It takes ten minutes and it is more accurate than any calculator preset, because only you know your traffic pattern.

1. Count awake hours. Out of 730 hours, how many does the app need to serve traffic? Be pessimistic. A cron that pings the app hourly keeps it awake permanently and quietly turns your scale to zero plan into an always on plan.
2. Pick the class and size honestly. Match your current server's RAM, then check whether you need Pro for autoscaling or preview environments. If you need Pro, you are on Growth at $20 and the compute never sleeps.
3. Add every worker separately. Queue workers and schedulers are their own compute instances. A worker that runs constantly is a second always on bill at its own size.
4. Add the database. MySQL from $5.50 a month plus $0.10 per GB, or Serverless Postgres at $0.106 per compute unit hour, $0.50 per GB month of storage and $0.25 for recovery history.
5. Add the plan fee, subtract $5. That is your number. Set the spending limit slightly above it.

Then run the same exercise for a server in your own cloud account with a flat fee panel on top, and compare the two totals at the awake hours you actually expect. If you want the other side of that comparison written out, we keep an honest Laravel Cloud alternative page and a Laravel Cloud versus Forge comparison that covers the control and workflow differences rather than only the money.

The same arithmetic is worth running against any metered platform you are comparing, because they all share this shape: a small plan fee, a generous sounding allowance, and a per unit rate that decides the invoice. Our Vercel pricing breakdown works through the identical exercise on Vercel's published rate card, and Vercel vs Netlify pricing shows how differently two platforms can price the same traffic.

Is there a Laravel Cloud pricing calculator?

Yes. Laravel's pricing page has an interactive estimator with four scenario presets: a hobby app, a personal blog, a SaaS MVP and an always on production app. You can change awake hours, region and resource sizes, and it prints an estimated monthly cost. It does not cover every line, so it is worth building the estimate yourself as well, which takes about two minutes.

The formula, using Laravel's own published US East rates

1. Compute: hours running each month multiplied by the size's rate, capped at the monthly price. Flex 512MB is $0.00893 an hour (cap $6), Flex 1GB $0.01786 ($12), Flex 2GB $0.03571 ($24), Pro 1vCPU/4GB $0.04762 ($32) and Pro 2vCPU/8GB $0.09524 ($64).
2. Database: a MySQL size from $5.50 a month plus $0.10 per GB, or Serverless Postgres at $0.106 per compute unit hour plus $0.50 per GB-month and $0.25 per GB-month of recovery history.
3. Cache and queues: Valkey from $5 a month, and $1 per million standard queue operations.
4. Plan fee: add $5, $20 or $200, then subtract the $5 included usage credit.

Rates vary by region and US East is among the cheapest, so an EU or Asia Pacific deployment costs more than this formula suggests. Check the region selector on Laravel's page before you budget.

How does Laravel Cloud pricing compare with Vercel, Netlify, Heroku and Supabase?

Laravel Cloud's $5 Starter and $20 Growth plans sit at the cheap end of managed platform pricing, but the plan fee is the smallest part of any of these bills. Every platform in this category charges a modest subscription and then meters compute, bandwidth and storage on top, which is why comparing headline prices tells you almost nothing.

The billing unit in the third column is the one that catches teams out, because it decides how the cost grows. Vercel grows with headcount, so adding three developers adds $60 a month before any traffic. Netlify and Laravel Cloud grow with usage rather than people. Supabase grows per organization, which makes isolating client projects unexpectedly expensive. Heroku grows per dyno, so horizontal scaling is linear and easy to forecast.

If you are costing a migration rather than a renewal, price the same workload on two or three of them before deciding. Our Vercel pricing, Netlify pricing, Heroku pricing and Supabase pricing breakdowns each hold the full published rate card, and Fly.io pricing covers the purely metered end of the spectrum where there are no plans at all.

Is Laravel Cloud serverless?

No. Laravel states plainly that Cloud is not serverless: it runs on dedicated AWS EC2 servers, which is what gives it predictable performance and predictable cost rather than per-invocation billing. This matters for your bill because you are paying for machine time while the app is awake, not for requests.

The part that behaves like serverless is scale-to-zero. Compute pauses when no traffic arrives and wakes in under 500 milliseconds, so an idle app accrues no compute cost. That is why a low-traffic app can genuinely sit near the $5 Starter fee, and why an app with steady round-the-clock traffic cannot.

Two capability notes worth having before you price a migration, both verified on laravel.com on 8 September 2026. Cloud runs Symfony applications on the same managed infrastructure, auto-detecting the framework and using php bin/console for commands, so it is not Laravel-only. And the Cloud API can be driven by AI agents to provision resources and trigger deployments programmatically. Managed databases are Serverless Postgres 17, with MySQL also offered and RDS available on Private Cloud.