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Examples

These examples show the costs for different real life setups including apps with multiple environments and different software stacks.

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fortrabbit / use cases

🚧

Live before Sunday night.

Side project hosting

Most side projects die undeployed. The first evening decides which ones don't.

An idea on a Saturday that should be on a real URL by Sunday evening. It might become something. It probably won't. Both outcomes are fine, and the hosting shouldn't punish either.

The first evening is the whole battle

A side project that isn't deployed the first evening usually never is. The gap between "runs on a laptop" and "has a URL somebody else can open" is where most of them die, and it's rarely the code that killed them.

What a hack needs on day one is small: PHP, a database, and an address. Each new app starts as a free trial — seven days, no credit card — and answers on a test domain with TLS already in place. For a one-person project the stack that reaches a working page fastest wins, and PHP remains hard to beat there: connect the GitHub repo, push, the deploy service runs Composer.

Kill it or grow it

Most of these go nowhere, and the platform is built for that: a trial app with no payment method deletes itself at trial end, and a paid app stops billing the day it's deleted. The few that grow scale a component at a time, on the same host, without a migration.

That asymmetry is the point: the downside is cheap and the upside doesn't require moving.

An honest account.

Different by design

A platform purpose-built for PHP. More than the sum of its parts.

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

How long does the first deploy take?
Minutes

Minutes - Create an app in the dashboard, connect the repo through the fortrabbit GitHub app, push. The deploy service runs Composer and the app answers on its test domain over HTTPS. Software templates pre-configure the build settings, so nothing has to be tuned before that first push works.

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What does a side project cost?
Cents per day

Cents per day - Only PHP, storage, and traffic are required components; MySQL gets booked when the project needs it. Everything starts on the smallest plan, a day costs 1/30th of the monthly price, and billing is postpaid — see [pricing](/pricing) for the numbers.

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What happens when the project is abandoned?
Nothing

Nothing - A trial app without a payment method deletes itself when the week ends — no forgotten subscription billing away in the background. With a payment method attached, deleting the app stops the billing that same day. Either way the experiment leaves nothing behind except the Git repo.

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Is a custom domain needed on day one?
No

No - Every environment comes with a test domain like `en-34fdsa.frbit.app`, TLS certificate pre-installed, always served over HTTPS. That's enough to share a link, collect a first reaction, and decide whether the idea deserves a real domain later.

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What if the hack actually takes off?
Scale a component

Scale a component - Components scale individually, so a project that gets attention usually needs a bigger PHP plan and nothing else. Plan changes take immediate effect and are prorated by the day — no migration, no re-platforming, the same app grows.

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What customers say

I just wanted to say that the documentation that you guys have and the service you provided me while I was initially setting everything up was probably the best I've encountered in my 20-ish years of front-end web development. Your dashboard is super simple and it has all of the right things for someone like me, and none of the fluff that isn't necessary.

Scott Cooper

Scott Cooper

Front-end developer

2023 — Customer support

As a design and development studio, managing and maintaining servers used to take a big chunk of our time, especially when things went wrong or major updates were needed. Passing that responsibility to fortrabbit, who are absolute experts and have a specialist team, was a game changer. The service is faultlessly stable, support is always fantastic & prompt and it scales with the click of a button. The whole experience is so scarily smooth! The time they have saved us could not be more valuable.

Josh Attwood

Josh Attwood

Creative director at Josh Attwood Studio

2026 — Direct feedback

I've been a fortrabbit customer for seven years, and I continue to appreciate its simplicity and reliability. Deploying Laravel applications is incredibly fast and intuitive: projects are online in just a few steps, without wasting time managing infrastructure. Support is always quick, knowledgeable, and practical. fortrabbit lets me focus on development, knowing everything else is in excellent hands.

AS

Andrea Spotorno

2026 — Direct feedback

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