DeployManage, server management for any cloud
Laravel Vapor costs $39 a month before AWS sends its own bill, and Laravel now steers Vapor customers toward Laravel Cloud, which is metered per second. If your traffic is steady rather than spiky, a server you own gives you a fixed bill and no cold starts. DeployManage provisions it on your AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Vultr account and, on the Growth plan, ships the same atomic, zero-downtime releases with one-click rollback.
One-time demo, no credit card required.
Vendor prices read from vapor.laravel.com, laravel.com and forge.laravel.com in September 2026.
| 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%
|
Laravel Vapor no longer accepts new signups, according to vapor.laravel.com in October 2026, so a new project needs another platform and existing Vapor teams are being pointed to Laravel Cloud. The best Laravel Vapor alternative depends on whether you still want serverless. If you do, Laravel Cloud is the successor Laravel itself recommends: $5, $20 or $200 a month plus metered compute, with no AWS account to manage. If your app runs all day at fairly steady traffic, serverless is the expensive option: Vapor is $39 a month plus Lambda, RDS and, for any private database, a NAT gateway that AWS bills at about $32 a month on its own. A panel on a VPS replaces that with a fixed bill. Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 a month is the cheapest route. DeployManage is $59 a month for three servers, or $129 on Growth for atomic deploys and rollback, on top of a $6 to $24 server from your own provider. On Growth that is more than Vapor's roughly $85 floor for one small app; it pays off for teams and agencies running several production apps across more than one cloud.
Vapor's own fee is the easy part. The AWS invoice underneath it splits into Lambda, RDS, SQS, CloudFront, S3 and a NAT gateway if the database is private. A VPS panel replaces that with one server price from your provider plus one panel fee, both fixed before the month starts.
Vapor builds a new release, runs migrations, then flips traffic. On Growth and Business, DeployManage does the same on a server: it clones into a fresh release directory, runs composer, migrations and cache warming, health-checks the result and swaps a symlink. Nothing is edited in place, so a failed build never touches the live site.
Vapor lets you roll back to a previous deployment from the CLI or dashboard. On DeployManage Growth and Business the last releases stay on disk and rollback is one click in the deploy log, with the previous symlink target restored in under a second.
Long-running jobs, big imports, PDF generation and WebSockets all fight the Lambda execution model. On a server the queue worker runs as long as the job needs, Reverb or Soketi stays up as a daemon, and PHP-FPM answers the first request as fast as the thousandth.
A Vapor app already lives in your AWS account, so the least disruptive move is an EC2 instance provisioned by DeployManage in the same account and region, next to the RDS instance you already have. If AWS itself was the cost problem, the same panel provisions Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode or OVHcloud.
You get SSH and root on every server DeployManage provisions. If you ever cancel, the servers, the Nginx config, the databases and the release directories stay exactly where they are on your provider's account. Leaving a panel should not mean rebuilding production.
Add an API key for AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode or OVHcloud. Servers are created inside that account and billed by the provider, never resold.
Pick a size and a region. DeployManage installs the stack, hardens SSH, opens the firewall for 80 and 443 only, and issues a Let's Encrypt certificate for your domain.
Connect GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket, paste the environment variables you kept in Vapor, and add queue workers and the scheduler from the site page. The deploy script runs composer, migrations and cache commands.
Run the first deploy while the Vapor environment still serves traffic. Once the release passes its health check, move the DNS record. If anything is wrong, roll back or flip DNS back; both take seconds.
Platform fees only, read from each vendor's own pricing page in September 2026. Compute is extra in every column: AWS usage for Vapor, metered compute for Laravel Cloud, and your own VPS bill for Forge and DeployManage.
swipe to see all columns →
| What you are comparing | DeployManage | Laravel Vapor | Laravel Cloud | Laravel Forge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | $59, $129 or $299/mo; yearly billing is half price | $39/mo or $399/yr, unlimited projects | $5, $20 or $200/mo plus usage | $12, $19 or $39/mo |
| Free entry | One-time demo: 1 server, 1 site, 1 deploy, no card | Sandbox: 1 project, 10 deployments, AWS domain only | First month of Starter free, $5 usage credit | None listed |
| Compute model | Your VPS, fixed monthly price | AWS Lambda in your account, plus RDS, SQS, S3, CloudFront | Managed servers, billed per second while awake, scales to zero | Your VPS, fixed monthly price |
| Fixed cost most people miss | None beyond the server | NAT gateway, about $32/mo, whenever the database is private | Plan fee continues while the app sleeps | None beyond the server |
| Deploys | Atomic release directories with symlink swap and git push deploys on Growth and Business | Atomic, via Vapor CLI or CI | Git push, zero downtime, under a minute | Git push; zero downtime on one server only |
| Rollback | Yes on Growth and Business, one click, previous releases kept | Yes, to a previous deployment | Yes | Yes, with the bundled zero-downtime deploys |
| Root or SSH access | Yes | No (Lambda) | No | Yes |
| Long-running jobs and WebSockets | Daemons and workers on your server | Lambda limits apply; Reverb needs a separate host | Managed queues; WebSockets supported | Daemons and workers on your server |
| Best for | Teams and agencies with steady-traffic production apps that want a fixed bill, any cloud and rollback | Spiky traffic on AWS with an AWS-literate team | Teams that want serverless comfort with no AWS account | Laravel-only shops that want first-party tooling |
Lambda is priced for bursts. An app that serves requests all day pays for every 100 ms of every request, plus the RDS instance and NAT gateway that never sleep. The same app on a 4 vCPU, 8 GB DigitalOcean droplet ($48) costs a fixed $107 a month with DeployManage Starter ($59), or $177 on Growth ($129) with atomic releases and rollback, and runs faster on the first request. Starter is cheaper than the Vapor bill; Growth costs more and buys the release safety Vapor had.
Metered per-second billing is hard to quote to a client. A panel with flat pricing lets the agency put one server per client on the invoice at the provider's published rate, keep root on each box, and deploy all of them from one dashboard with the same rollback on Growth.
Report generation, video processing and large CSV imports do not fit the serverless execution window without being chopped up. A queue worker under Supervisor on a VPS runs the job to completion, and DeployManage restarts workers on every deploy so they pick up the new code.
Vapor hands WebSockets to a separately hosted Reverb or Pusher, and the scheduler runs as a Lambda invocation. On a server, Reverb runs as a daemon next to the app, the scheduler is a cron entry, and all of it is managed from one site page.
For a team that still wants serverless, the best Laravel Vapor alternative is Laravel Cloud, because Laravel built it as Vapor's successor, publishes a migration guide, and removes the AWS account from the picture. For a team whose traffic is steady and whose bill has drifted upward, the best alternative is a server you own with a panel that deploys atomically. Laravel Forge is the first-party version of that at $12 to $39 a month. DeployManage is the cloud-neutral version at $59 a month for three servers, with queue workers, cron, SSL and firewall on every plan, atomic releases and one-click rollback from Growth at $129, and a one-time demo before you pay. It costs more than Forge; the fee buys team seats, one panel across any cloud, any app (Laravel, PHP, Node.js, WordPress) and a fleet-wide audit trail.
The honest split is about traffic shape, not brand. Serverless wins when requests arrive in unpredictable bursts and the app is idle between them. A fixed server wins when the app is busy most of the day, because you stop paying per request for work that a $24 machine would do without noticing.
If you need to stay inside AWS, the fixed server route is EC2. Our page on how to deploy Laravel to AWS EC2 compares Vapor with Elastic Beanstalk, Forge on AWS and DeployManage on the same instance sizes.
Laravel Vapor costs $39 a month or $399 a year for unlimited projects and deployments, plus everything AWS charges for the resources Vapor creates in your account. The free Sandbox tier is limited to one project, ten deployments and an Amazon-supplied domain, so it is a place to try the tooling rather than to run anything.
The AWS side is where the bill gets hard to predict. A typical Vapor production environment runs Lambda for the web and queue functions, an RDS database, SQS for the queue, S3 for assets and CloudFront in front of them. If the database is private, which is the sensible default, Vapor's own documentation notes that AWS bills the required NAT gateway by the hour at roughly $32 a month before any traffic passes through it. Add the smallest production RDS instance at AWS's published on-demand rate, about $12 a month for a db.t4g.micro in us-east-1, and the floor for a small always-on Vapor app is around $85 a month before Lambda usage, with CloudFront and S3 on top.
Compare that with the same app on a VPS: a 2 vCPU, 4 GB server is $6 to $24 a month depending on the provider. With Laravel Forge ($12 to $39) the total is $18 to $63 a month. With DeployManage Starter ($59) it is $65 to $83, and $135 to $153 on Growth ($129), which adds atomic releases and rollback. Every one of those is fixed, with root access and no per-request meter, but for a single small app DeployManage Growth costs more than the Vapor floor.
No, not for production, and new users can no longer sign up at all. For existing accounts Vapor lists a free Sandbox tier, but it allows a single project, ten deployments in total and only an Amazon-supplied domain, so you cannot attach your own domain to it. Every real deployment needs the $39 a month Unlimited plan, and AWS charges for the Lambda, RDS, SQS and networking resources on top, regardless of the Vapor tier. There is no free tier on the AWS resources beyond the standard AWS free-tier allowances, which most production databases and NAT gateways do not fall under.
Laravel Cloud is a fully managed platform run by the Laravel team; Vapor is a control layer over your own AWS account. Cloud charges a plan fee of $5, $20 or $200 a month plus per-second metered compute that scales to zero when the app sleeps, and every paid plan includes $5 of monthly usage credit. Vapor charges $39 a month flat plus whatever AWS bills. Laravel's own comparison page says customers migrating from Vapor to Cloud have seen up to 50 percent lower costs, which mostly reflects Vapor accounts that were paying for NAT gateways and idle RDS instances.
What Cloud does not give you is a machine. There is no root access, no SSH and no daemon you control, and the plan fee continues even when compute scales to zero. If you need those things, or you want a bill that does not move with traffic, neither Vapor nor Cloud is the right shape, and a VPS panel is. Our Laravel Cloud pricing page walks through the metered rates, and the Laravel Cloud alternative page covers the same decision from the Cloud side.
Forge and Vapor are both first-party Laravel products, but they sit on opposite sides of the serverless line. Forge provisions and manages real servers on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, Vultr, Linode and others for $12 (Hobby), $19 (Growth) or $39 (Business) a month, with your server billed separately by the provider. Vapor runs the app on Lambda for $39 a month plus AWS usage. Forge gives you SSH and root, daemons, cron and queue workers on the box; Vapor gives you autoscaling with no server to patch.
Forge's zero-downtime deployments come with a limitation its FAQ states plainly: they work on a single server, and multi-server rollouts need a separate tool. DeployManage runs atomic releases with rollback on every server on its Growth ($129) and Business plans, provisions the same providers plus OVHcloud, and starts at $59 a month for three servers, more than Forge at every tier. The Laravel Forge alternative page has the full feature table if you are weighing the two panels rather than Vapor.
Vapor is closed to new customers: vapor.laravel.com now states "Laravel Vapor is no longer accepting new signups." Laravel has not published an end of life date for existing accounts as of October 2026, and teams already on Vapor keep deploying on the $39 a month or $399 a year Unlimited plan. The same page links to an explanation of why teams are moving from Vapor to Laravel Cloud and runs a migration webinar banner, laravel.com publishes a Cloud versus Vapor page and an official migration guide, and Cloud is clearly where new investment goes.
What that means in practice: if you are starting a project, Vapor is no longer an option, so the choice is Laravel Cloud, another serverless or container platform, or a server you own. If you already run on Vapor, nothing breaks today, but every new feature, AWS runtime update and support answer now depends on a product that has stopped growing. Plan the move on your own schedule rather than after an announcement, and price both routes with the worked bills on this page.
A Vapor app is a standard Laravel app with a vapor.yml file and a few Vapor-specific packages, so the migration is mostly infrastructure rather than code. The order that avoids downtime:
If nobody on the team has moved an app off Lambda before, the steps above are a few hours of work for someone who has, and it is a sensible one-off job to hand to a contractor rather than to learn on production.
Ready to stop managing servers by hand? DeployManage provisions, deploys and monitors your fleet from one dashboard.
Get startedLaravel Cloud if you want to stay serverless, since Laravel built it as Vapor's successor and charges $5 to $200 a month plus metered compute. A VPS panel if your traffic is steady: Laravel Forge at $12 to $39 a month is the cheapest, or DeployManage at $59 a month for three servers on any cloud, with atomic deploys and rollback on Growth at $129.
Laravel Vapor costs $39 a month or $399 a year for unlimited projects, plus AWS charges for Lambda, RDS, SQS, S3 and CloudFront. A private database adds a NAT gateway that AWS bills at about $32 a month, so a small always-on production app typically starts around $85 a month before request volume.
No. Vapor no longer accepts new signups, so new users cannot start on any tier. Existing accounts see a free Sandbox limited to one project, ten deployments and an Amazon-supplied domain; production use needs the $39 a month plan, and AWS bills the underlying resources separately.
Vapor no longer accepts new signups, as vapor.laravel.com states in October 2026. Laravel has not announced an end date for existing accounts, which keep running on the $39 a month plan, but it markets Laravel Cloud as the platform to move to and publishes a Vapor to Cloud migration guide.
Vapor deploys your app to AWS Lambda inside your own AWS account for $39 a month plus AWS usage. Laravel Cloud is a fully managed platform with no AWS account, priced at $5, $20 or $200 a month plus per-second compute that scales to zero. Neither gives you root access to a machine.
It depends on the panel. Vapor's $39 fee plus a NAT gateway and RDS instance is around $85 a month before Lambda usage. A 2 vCPU, 4 GB VPS is $6 to $24 a month; with Laravel Forge that is $18 to $63 fixed, clearly cheaper. With DeployManage Starter ($59) it is $65 to $83, and with Growth ($129, atomic releases and rollback) $135 to $153, which is more than a small Vapor app. Vapor is also cheaper when the app is idle most of the time and traffic arrives in bursts.
Yes. A Vapor app is a standard Laravel app with a vapor.yml file. Provision a server, move the environment variables, switch the cache and queue drivers from DynamoDB and SQS to Redis, deploy, copy the database and switch DNS. The Vapor-specific packages can then be removed.
Yes, on the Growth ($129 a month) and Business plans. Each deploy builds in a fresh release directory, runs composer, migrations and cache commands, passes a health check and then swaps a symlink, so the live site is never edited in place. Previous releases are kept and rollback is one click. Starter does not include atomic releases or rollback.
Forge is cheaper on the platform fee, at $12 to $39 a month against Vapor's $39, and a VPS is cheaper than Lambda plus RDS plus a NAT gateway for anything that runs all day. Vapor only comes out ahead when traffic is spiky enough that the server would sit idle most of the time.
Provision a server in the AWS account your Vapor app already lives in, or on Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Vultr, and ship atomic releases with one-click rollback for a fixed $129 a month on Growth. Every account starts with a one-time demo, no card required.