# Laravel Vapor alternative for PHP hosting

Source: https://www.fortrabbit.com/alternatives/laravel-vapor
Published: 2026-10-31
Updated: 2026-10-31


## About Laravel Vapor

Laravel Vapor is the serverless platform from Laravel, revealed in 2019. It deploys Laravel to AWS Lambda in the customer's own AWS account, with SQS for queues, S3 for files, CloudFront for assets and RDS or Aurora Serverless for the database. The subscription costs $39 a month, plus the AWS bill. Vapor no longer accepts new signups, and Laravel's migration docs point to Laravel Cloud.

## Why not Laravel Vapor?

No new projects can start on Vapor. Existing projects run on, with Lambda limits to plan around: a temporary filesystem, timeouts, no Horizon, and two bills, one from Laravel and one from AWS.

## Why fortrabbit

fortrabbit runs Laravel as a regular PHP app on AWS, with no AWS account on the customer's side. Git push deploys, Composer and npm in the build, MySQL as a component, a persistent disk, and the scheduler and queue workers as jobs. Laravel Cloud is the other way out, compared on [its own page](/alternatives/laravel-cloud).

## Vapor and fortrabbit

| Feature | Laravel Vapor | fortrabbit |
| -- | -- | -- |
| New signups | Closed | Open |
| Runtime | AWS Lambda | PHP containers |
| Bills | Vapor and AWS | One |
| Queues | SQS | Database driver, workers |
| Filesystem | Temporary, S3 | Persistent storage |
| Database | RDS, Aurora Serverless | MySQL component |

## FAQ

### Is Laravel Vapor shutting down?

**No new signups** — Vapor takes no new signups. Existing customers can still sign in, and Laravel points them to Laravel Cloud for migration.

### Does fortrabbit need an AWS account?

**No** — Vapor deploys into the customer's AWS account, billed by AWS on top of the Vapor subscription. fortrabbit runs on AWS too, with one bill from us.

### Do queues and the scheduler work without SQS?

**Yes** — Laravel's database queue driver runs on MySQL, with a worker and a cron job for the scheduler, both set in the dashboard.

---

- [Migrate from Laravel Vapor](/migrate/from-laravel-vapor)
- [How to choose](/alternatives/how-to-choose-php-hosting)