Laravel Cloud: ship your app without babysitting servers
Laravel Cloud is the house bet on an official PaaS: push the repo, set the environment, and the platform handles PHP, queues, the database, and TLS. For teams already in the ecosystem (Forge, Vapor, Envoyer) it is the missing production target: it smells like Laravel, not like an Nginx tutorial.
What it actually fixes
The hidden cost of production Laravel is not a $12 VPS. It is the expired certificate, the stuck queue, undersized PHP-FPM, and the backup nobody restored. A good PaaS shortens that list. If your app is a SaaS with frequent deploys, you feel it in weeks, not in slides.
- Git deploys without artisanal SSH.
- Secrets and environments (local, preview, production) as first-class citizens.
- Worker scale when the queue fills with mail or invoice jobs.
- TLS and HTTP/2 without fighting a hosting panel.
When it is the wrong answer
If the client needs data residency in a specific datacenter, network hooks into an on-prem ERP, or a predictable hosting bill for a marketing site, Laravel Cloud does not win. It also does not win if the team cannot pay for PaaS and thinks “no servers” means “no invoice.”
No servers means not yours. Theirs still get billed.
At Apify we still pick the target by product: marketing sites on managed hosting, APIs in the cloud when traffic and queues demand it, and a VPS when the client needs control or a closed budget. Laravel Cloud sits at the table as a serious option for Laravel apps. Not as a religion.