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Putting all your eggs in one basket?

Laravel Cloud alternative for PHP hosting

Q: How does pricing compare for a small Laravel app?

Fixed vs metered - Laravel Cloud charges a plan fee from $5 a month plus the resources the app uses while awake. fortrabbit charges fixed components per app, from about €5 a month with MySQL, billed in arrears.

Q: Is the code portable off fortrabbit?

Yes - Apps run as standard PHP from a normal git repository. There is no proprietary runtime to unwind, and cancellation runs from the dashboard with immediate effect.

Framework, server tools, monitoring and now hosting, all from one venture-funded company. fortrabbit is the independent option, with a fixed bill.

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About Laravel Cloud

Laravel Cloud is a service somewhere between PaaS and vanity hosting. It's made by Laravel Holdings Inc. and thus an official part of the Laravel ecosystem. The framework is free and open source. The company sells the tools around it: Forge, Nightwatch and now Cloud. In 2024 Laravel announced $57 million in funding.

Laravel Cloud is a PaaS in the tradition of Heroku and, well, fortrabbit. It runs Laravel and Symfony. Plans cost $5, $20 or $200 a month plus usage, so the actual bill is a bit hard to predict. It has many advanced features, such as hibernation, autoscaling and preview environments.

Why not Laravel Cloud?

You may not want to put all your eggs in one basket. Framework, server tools, monitoring and hosting, all from one venture-funded company. Investors want their money back.

Eye-candy is maybe not that important for you
You look for backward compatibility: SSH, SFTP, a disk
Hosting budget plays a role, and your clients want a fixed quote
The Craft CMS site or the WordPress blog next door needs a home too
Ultimate scaling sounds nice, but is not a hard requirement
It's OK when your first app is up in 5, not 2 minutes

Why fortrabbit

fortrabbit is more down-to-earth. We provide a commercial hosting solution for freelancers, agencies and startups. This is our target audience, not the bycatch for the bigger fish.

Independent: fortrabbit is bootstrapped and owner-run since 2012. We don't have to increase shareholder value. Small projects are our core business, not a marketing effort to attract big clients.

Dedicated: Hosting is our only business, not one product out of many.

Framework agnostic: You write PHP code, we run it. Laravel, Symfony, Craft CMS, WordPress or plain PHP, most likely without major refactoring.

Human support: Talk directly to us using our support chat. See our support features.

Good Laravel support: We have hosted Laravel for many years. There is comprehensive documentation, see our Laravel guides.

Laravel Cloud and fortrabbit

Feature	Laravel Cloud	fortrabbit
PHP apps	Laravel, Symfony	Any PHP
SSH / SFTP	No	All plans
Files	Object storage buckets	Persistent storage
Regions	9 AWS regions	EU (Ireland), US
Pricing	$5–$200 plan + usage	Per component, arrears
Company	Laravel Holdings, VC	Independent, bootstrapped

# Different by design

Pay in arrears

Daily prorated, post-paid billing. No upfront payment, no yearly commitment.

Modular pricing

Pay per component and scale each one from xs to 2xl on its own.

No dark patterns

No vendor lock-in, no upselling, no misleading messages.

Humans in support

Eye-level developer chat over the support bubble. No sales calls.

Developer-first

Git-push deploy, SSH access, bring your own code. No 1-click bloat.

Managed platform

A hardened, service-oriented PHP stack. Deploy code, skip the server admin.

# Frequently asked

Does fortrabbit only run Laravel?

No - Laravel, Symfony, Statamic, Craft CMS, Kirby, WordPress and plain PHP run on the same platform. Laravel Cloud runs Laravel and Symfony on PHP; Craft CMS, WordPress and plain PHP are not supported there.

How does pricing compare for a small Laravel app?

Fixed vs metered

Fixed vs metered - Laravel Cloud charges a plan fee from $5 a month plus the resources the app uses while awake. fortrabbit charges fixed components per app, from about €5 a month with MySQL, billed in arrears.

Is the code portable off fortrabbit?

Yes

Yes - Apps run as standard PHP from a normal git repository. There is no proprietary runtime to unwind, and cancellation runs from the dashboard with immediate effect.

# What customers say

Having fortrabbit is like having a dedicated DevOps engineer on the team, taking care of the infrastructure so we can focus on writing code. We've used many PaaS providers, but none come close to fortrabbit's mix of features, reliability, predictable and fair pricing, and fast, genuinely helpful support. Their service has been rock solid, giving us the confidence that our apps are in good hands.

Len van Essen

CTO at Fitwinkel

2026 — Direct feedback

Unmatched performances and ease-of-configure. I really like what fortrabbit is doing for the modern PHP hosting ecosystem, and I'd suggest anyone to have a try with them.

Federico Magnani

CTO at glueglue