Laravel Cloud Pricing in 2026: One App at $32, $144 and $379 vs Forge vs Your Own Server

A typical Laravel app (web, a queue worker, MySQL and a Redis-compatible cache) costs about $32 a month on Laravel Cloud when it's small, $144 at a medium size and $379 when it's large, running all month in US East. The same three apps on Forge plus a Hetzner server cost $19, $31 and $57, and on your own server with Ployz $16, $28 and $47. Laravel Cloud's plan fee is the small part. The bill comes from paying separately for every piece that's awake.

Prices checked 2026-10-01, from Laravel's own Cloud pricing page, its pricing docs, the Forge pricing page, and the server providers' pages, linked next to each number. Laravel Cloud bills in USD; I used US East (Virginia). Hetzner's prices are for Europe.

I've paid this bill myself. My first month on Laravel Cloud came to about $600. That's part of why I now run everything on one rented server, and why I'm biased. Here's the maths so you can check me.

What would your Laravel app cost on Laravel Cloud?

Move the sliders to match your app. The Laravel Cloud row assumes everything stays awake all month (no hibernation), MySQL rather than Postgres, and a Valkey cache sized to the app. The server rows fit the same RAM onto one or more rented servers.

How much does Laravel Cloud cost?

Laravel Cloud has four plans: Starter at $5 a month, Growth at $20, Business at $200 and Enterprise at a custom price. Every paid plan includes $5 of usage credit a month, and everything you run is billed on top by the second. Starter's first month is free. Unlimited apps, environments and team members are included on every plan.

Extra custom domains are $0.25 a month each, and bandwidth past your allowance is $0.10 per GB on every plan. You can set an organization spending limit; when you hit it, "compute pauses automatically" until you raise it or the next cycle starts (pricing FAQ). That protects your wallet, but it also means your site goes down, so set it with care.

What does Laravel Cloud charge for compute, and does hibernation help?

App compute runs from $6 a month (Flex, 512 MiB) to $256 (Pro, 8 vCPU and 32 GiB) in US East. You pay per second while a replica runs, capped at 28 days a month. Flex compute can scale to zero and wake in under 500 ms, so an app that sleeps most of the day costs a fraction of the cap. An app with steady traffic never sleeps, so plan on the full price.

The cap is stated plainly: "each replica is billed for a maximum of 28 days (2,419,200 seconds) every billing cycle" (pricing docs). Each extra replica is another full price. Frankfurt costs more: Flex 1 GiB is $14 there and Pro 8 GiB is $68.

Hibernation is real money for quiet apps. Laravel's own calculator puts a rarely used quiz app at about $0.39 a month and a small blog at about $6.23 (Cloud pricing). My small reference app below, awake 200 hours a month, would come to about $10 instead of $32.

Two things keep apps awake, though. The scheduler wakes the environment for each task, and "a task that runs every 5 minutes on an environment with a 5-minute sleep timeout will never allow the environment to sleep" (scheduled tasks). And a worker cluster that follows the app to sleep "stops when the App cluster's sleep timeout elapses, even if a background process is still running" (workers). If your app has paying users and a busy queue, I'd price it as always on.

What do MySQL, Postgres, Valkey and queues cost on Laravel Cloud?

Laravel MySQL starts at $6.60 a month (Flex, 512 MiB) and runs to $384 (Pro, 32 GiB), plus $0.10 per GB-month of storage and backups in US East. Serverless Postgres (Neon) is $0.106 per compute-hour plus $0.50 per GB-month. Valkey caches start at $6 a month for 250 MB. Managed queue workers bill per second; a small one costs under a cent an hour.

Look at the cache line. A 1 GB Valkey costs $24 a month, the same as the 2 GiB app server. On a rented server, Redis with a gigabyte of data is a line in a config file.

MySQL's storage price includes daily backups (pricing docs). That is a real feature, and you give it up on your own server. Postgres is cheap while asleep, but awake all month at the listed $0.106 an hour it comes to about $76 before storage.

Queues changed this year. Managed queues are now the default. Flex workers scale to zero but cap each job at 90 seconds; Pro workers have no limit but never sleep (managed queues). The old queue clusters were sunset on 30 September 2026 (workers). On Starter you can also run queue:work as a background process on the app cluster, sharing its CPU, which is what my small app does.

If you still have a Redis by Upstash cache from the early days, its prices rise on 30 November 2026 (250 MB goes from $5 to $10) and it shuts down on Laravel Cloud on 31 August 2027 (pricing docs). Plan the move to Valkey now.

How does Laravel Cloud bill bandwidth?

Every second a compute instance runs, it earns a slice of free bandwidth: 100 GB a month for a Flex 1 GiB app, up to 800 GB for Pro 32 GiB. Allowances are pooled across your organization, and anything over costs $0.10 per GB. Traffic between your app and Laravel MySQL or Valkey is free; Serverless Postgres is a partner service, so that traffic counts.

The docs give the example: "a Flex 1GiB RAM instance earns 100GB of data transfer allowance per month" (bandwidth). The catch is that a hibernating app earns less, because it earns per second awake. And the bigger Pro sizes earn less per dollar than Flex: Pro 4 GiB costs $32 and earns 100 GB, the same as a $12 Flex 1 GiB.

For most Laravel apps this stays small. My large app at 1 TB pays $50 in overage. Hetzner's CX servers include 20 TB.

What does a typical Laravel app cost on Laravel Cloud at three sizes?

Running all month in US East, my small Laravel app costs $32, the medium one $144 and the large one $379. The database and cache together are 41 to 63% of each bill. The plan fee is $5 or $20. Hibernation would cut the small app to about $10, but not the other two, which have users and queued jobs around the clock.

The three apps:

• Small: a Flex 1 GiB app with queue:work running on it, MySQL Flex 1 GiB with 10 GB, Valkey 250 MB, 50 GB of traffic. Fits Starter.
• Medium: a Pro 4 GiB app, a separate 1 GiB worker cluster running the queue and scheduler, MySQL Pro 4 GiB with 25 GB, Valkey 1 GB, 300 GB of traffic. Needs Growth.
• Large: a Pro 16 GiB app, a Pro 4 GiB worker cluster, MySQL Pro 8 GiB with 100 GB, Valkey 2.5 GB, 1 TB of traffic. Growth.

These are my assumptions about typical apps, not measurements. Your usage dashboard has the real numbers.

The same apps in Frankfurt come to about $37, $156 and $407, because compute and MySQL cost more there.

How much does Laravel Forge cost?

Forge is $12 a month on Hobby, $19 on Growth and $39 on Business, flat, with unlimited sites and deployments. You pay for the server separately, either to a provider like Hetzner or DigitalOcean or to Laravel through Laravel VPS. Hobby allows one server from an outside provider plus unlimited Laravel VPS servers; Growth and up allow unlimited servers.

Forge does the things a Laravel app needs on a server: queue workers under Supervisor (queues), the scheduler as a cron job (scheduler), and zero-downtime deploys on one server. Its pricing page also lists database backups and server monitoring (Forge pricing). It deploys from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket.

The servers I used:

Hetzner prices exclude VAT and are from its 15 June 2026 price adjustment, the second rise this year. The CX line is Europe only. In the US, Hetzner's own servers now cost more than DigitalOcean, so I priced DigitalOcean for US readers. Netcup's Manassas datacenter is the cheaper US option, and I'd look there first.

Is Laravel Forge a VPS?

No. Forge is a server management panel: it connects to a server you own, installs Nginx, PHP, MySQL or Postgres and Redis, and deploys your code. Laravel VPS is the part that is a VPS. It's a server Laravel sells through Forge, "offered through our infrastructure partnership with DigitalOcean," billed by the hour (Laravel VPS docs).

Laravel VPS is priced about like the matching DigitalOcean Droplet: the 2 vCPU, 4 GB size is $25 on Hobby against $24 for the Droplet. You pay a dollar for one bill and instant setup.

Laravel Cloud vs Forge: which is cheaper?

Forge plus a server is cheaper at every size I priced: $19 against $32 for the small app, $31 against $144 for the medium one and $57 against $379 for the large one, using Hetzner in Europe. With DigitalOcean in the US it's $36, $108 and $211, still cheaper. You give up autoscaling, hibernation, managed backups and someone else on call.

To size the servers I added up the RAM each app gets on Laravel Cloud (app, worker, database, cache) plus 0.5 GB for the system, and picked the smallest server that fits. That's generous to Laravel Cloud's side: on one server, PHP, MySQL and Redis share spare CPU and RAM instead of each sitting on its own slice. The medium app gets 8 vCPU on a CX43, against 1 vCPU for the app on Laravel Cloud.

The gap grows with size because Laravel Cloud charges for each resource separately, while a rented server costs the same whether it runs one process or ten. I wrote about this pattern across platforms in the hidden costs of PaaS, and it looks the same on Railway and Render.

What the server price leaves out:

• No autoscaling. One server has a ceiling. Laravel Cloud adds replicas and the bill goes up instead.
• No hibernation. A server costs the same at 3 a.m. For a side project that sleeps most of the time, Laravel Cloud's Starter plan can be cheaper.
• Upkeep is yours. OS updates, firewall rules and, on Forge, PHP upgrades. When the server fails at night, it's your problem.

Can you run Laravel on your own server without Forge?

Yes. The work is the same five pieces: PHP behind a web server, queue:work kept alive, the scheduler running every minute, MySQL or Postgres, and Redis. Forge sets these up on a server for $12 to $39 a month. You can also do it by hand with Docker and Caddy, or use a self-hosted tool that does it for free.

I build Ployz, one of those tools, so here's how the reference app maps onto it, honestly. Push to GitHub and Ployz builds the app on your server with Railpack, which detects PHP, so no Dockerfile. A second service from the same repo with the start command php artisan queue:work is your worker. MySQL, Postgres and Redis are one-click presets. Migrations go in a pre-deploy command, and with a health check set, a new version has to pass it before the old one stops.

Two gaps matter for Laravel:

• No cron. Ployz has no scheduled jobs. Run the scheduler as one more service with php artisan schedule:work, which "will run in the foreground and invoke the scheduler every minute" (Laravel docs). Laravel documents it for local use, but it works the same as a long-running service. Keep it at one replica so tasks don't run twice. If you'd rather use cron, put schedule:run in the server's own crontab instead.
• No backups. The database presets are regular services with a volume, not managed databases, and Ployz doesn't back them up. Laravel Cloud's MySQL includes daily backups, and Forge lists database backups as a feature. On your own server, run mysqldump or pg_dump from the server's crontab and copy the file off the machine.

For the large app, the database can go on its own server: servers join an encrypted private network and services reach each other by name. Ployz is free on your own servers; I added $9 a month for custom domains on Ployz Cloud to every Ployz price above. Other tools do this too, and some have backups and cron that Ployz lacks. I compared them in self-hosted PaaS.

Is Laravel Cloud cheap?

For small apps that sleep, yes. Starter is $5 with $5 of credit, and a quiet app with hibernation can stay under $10. For apps with steady traffic, no. Every piece is billed separately and stays awake, so a modest production app passes $100 a month, and a busy one passes $350, where a rented server costs $20 to $60.

My own first month came to about $600. The tables above show how bills like that happen: a few always-on pieces at a few dozen dollars each add up much faster than the $20 plan fee suggests. If you're on Laravel Cloud now, the usage page splits the bill by resource. I'd look at the database and cache lines first: in the table above they're 41 to 63% of the bill.

If you're also weighing non-Laravel hosts, I priced a similar app with a worker and a database across six platforms in Vercel alternatives.

Laravel Cloud, Forge or your own server?

Pick Laravel Cloud if your app is idle most of the day and can hibernate, you want autoscaling for real traffic spikes, or you want Laravel to run MySQL backups and the servers so nobody on your team has to. Starter at $5 is a fair price for a side project.

Pick Forge if you want a Laravel-shaped server panel with queues, the scheduler and database backups built in, and you're happy paying $12 to $19 a month for it. It's the safe middle: about $19 to $57 a month for apps that cost $32 to $379 on Laravel Cloud.

Pick your own server if your app runs all day with a queue and a database, and you'd rather the bill stay flat as you grow. A $16 to $47 setup covers what costs $32 to $379 on Laravel Cloud. You take on backups, OS updates and a scheduler service in exchange.

Ployz deploys your Laravel app to servers you rent, with a preview environment for every pull request and zero-downtime deploys, and it's free on your own servers.