Laravel Cloud vs Forge vs Hetzner: What I'd Actually Pick at Each Stage

Originally published at covers what's coming on that front.

Forge at this scale means managing multiple servers, a load balancer, and probably a separate Redis instance. The Business plan at $39/month includes monitoring and automated database backups, which you need at 100k users. The Hetzner bill grows with your server count. Total lands at $80-120/month depending on architecture.

A bare VPS setup at this scale requires real infrastructure work, load balancers, Redis clusters, backup scripts, monitoring. It's the cheapest option but it's a part-time job.

What doesn't show up on the invoice

Your time. A bare VPS is cheap in cash but expensive in hours. Initial setup for someone who knows what they're doing is 3-5 hours. Ongoing maintenance is roughly 2 hours a month: security patches, PHP updates, debugging a failed deployment on a Friday evening. Multiply your hourly rate by that and the VPS isn't cheap anymore.

Forge cuts ongoing maintenance to near zero and initial setup to under an hour. Cloud cuts it entirely.

The deployment pipeline. Forge gives you zero-downtime deployments out of the box. On a bare VPS you configure that yourself. It's learnable. The to get the security layer sorted once and forget about it.

Small team building a product: Laravel Cloud Growth. When multiple developers are deploying, having one person own the servers creates a bottleneck. Cloud removes that entirely. Preview environments per PR are a real productivity win at this stage.

Agency managing client sites: Forge Business at $39/month. Unlimited servers, automated database backups, and server monitoring across all client projects. The per-client cost when split across 10 sites is negligible.

App with unpredictable traffic: Laravel Cloud. Product Hunt launches, viral moments, seasonal spikes. If your traffic can 10x overnight, you want autoscaling and you don't want to be the one managing it at midnight. The full SaaS architecture guide covers how to structure the app layer to take full advantage of Cloud's scaling.

FAQ

Can I switch from Forge or a bare VPS to Laravel Cloud later?

Yes. It's a deployment change, not a code change. Your Laravel app runs identically on both. The migration is mainly about moving your database and updating your deployment pipeline. Most teams do it in a day.

What's the real total cost of Forge?

Forge Growth is $19/month plus your VPS. A Hetzner CX22 at €4.49/month brings the total to roughly $24-25/month. That's competitive with Cloud's Starter tier but with unlimited servers and flat-rate billing, so no usage surprises.

Does Laravel Cloud handle queue workers and cron jobs?

Yes. Queue workers and cron jobs are first-class features on Growth and above. It's one of the things that makes Cloud well-suited for SaaS, where background processing is usually essential.

What about Laravel Vapor?

Vapor runs on AWS Lambda at $39/month plus AWS usage. It's the right choice for workloads with extreme traffic variability or teams deep in the AWS ecosystem. For most Laravel developers, Cloud or Forge fits better.

Is the $5/month plan for Laravel Cloud available yet?

Not as of this writing. The Laravel team announced it as coming soon in May 2026. The current entry point is the Starter tier with no base fee and pay-as-you-go usage, which runs $4-8/month for a small app.

The honest version

The developers who regret their infrastructure choice usually overbuilt early or held on to a cheap setup for too long. A €4.49 Hetzner server handles your first 10,000 users fine if it's set up correctly. Cloud makes sense when your traffic becomes unpredictable or when server maintenance is competing with feature work. Forge sits in the middle and is the right answer for more situations than it gets credit for.

Start with the cheapest option that doesn't slow you down. Upgrade when the friction becomes real, not before.

Got a side project or SaaS and want a second opinion on the infrastructure setup? Get in touch.

Vollständiger Original-Bericht

Ausführliche Details, Code-Beispiele & Hersteller-Stellungnahme auf dev.to.

↗ Original-Artikel auf dev.to lesen