Stellify is Built on Laravel But Can Be Hosted Anywhere: Here's What It Costs in 2026

Stellify uses Laravel as its backend framework. When you export a Stellify project, you get a standard Laravel application—which means you have access to the entire Laravel hosting ecosystem.

One of the first questions you'll face is: what's this going to cost me to host? The answer isn't straightforward because it depends entirely on how much infrastructure you want to manage yourself versus how much you want handled for you.

This post breaks down the real costs across the most common hosting approaches in 2026.

The Three Approaches

There are essentially three ways to host a Laravel application:

1. Self-managed VPS — You rent a virtual server, install everything yourself, and manage it ongoing.
2. VPS + provisioning tool — You rent a server but use a tool like Laravel Forge to handle setup and deployment.
3. Fully managed platform — You push code and the platform handles everything else. Laravel Cloud, Railway, Render, and similar services fall here.

Each sits on a spectrum of cost versus convenience. Let's look at the actual numbers.

Self-Managed VPS

This is the cheapest route but demands the most from you. You're responsible for installing PHP, Nginx/Apache, your database, SSL certificates, firewall rules, security patches, backups, and deployment pipelines.

Hetzner is the name that comes up most often in cost-conscious Laravel circles, and for good reason. Their pricing for shared CPU instances:

• 2 vCPU / 2GB RAM — ~€4/month (~$4.75)
• 2 vCPU / 4GB RAM — ~€8/month (~$9.50)
• 4 vCPU / 8GB RAM — ~€15/month (~$17.80)

These prices include generous bandwidth allowances and are hard to beat on raw value. Hetzner's data centres are primarily in Europe (Germany, Finland) with a presence in the US and Singapore.

DigitalOcean is slightly more expensive but has broader global coverage and better documentation:

• 1 vCPU / 1GB RAM — $6/month
• 2 vCPU / 2GB RAM — $18/month
• 2 vCPU / 4GB RAM — $24/month

Vultr and Linode (now part of Akamai) sit in a similar range to DigitalOcean, typically $5-24/month for comparable specs.

What you'll also need:

A VPS alone doesn't give you a database. You can run MySQL or PostgreSQL on the same server (no extra cost but uses your server's RAM), or use a managed database service ($15/month on DigitalOcean, more on AWS RDS).

Realistic total for a small self-managed Laravel app: $5-25/month depending on provider and specs.

The hidden cost: Your time. Setting up a secure, properly configured Laravel server from scratch takes hours. Maintaining it—applying security patches, managing SSL renewals, configuring backups, debugging Nginx issues—is ongoing. If your time is worth anything, this "saving" may not actually be one.

VPS + Laravel Forge

Laravel Forge is the middle ground that most experienced Laravel developers land on. Forge provisions and manages servers on your chosen cloud provider (DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, Vultr, Linode, and others). It handles PHP installation, Nginx configuration, SSL via Let's Encrypt, database setup, deployment from Git, queue workers, and scheduled tasks.

Forge pricing:

• Hobby plan: $12/month (1 server)
• Growth plan: $19/month (3 servers)
• Business plan: $39/month (unlimited servers)

Combined cost examples:

What you still manage: Server scaling, performance monitoring, and infrastructure decisions. Forge handles provisioning and deployment, not architecture. If your app gets a traffic spike, you need to manually scale or have planned for it.

Realistic total for a small production Laravel app on Forge: $18-36/month.

Laravel Cloud (Fully Managed)

Laravel Cloud launched in February 2025 as a fully managed platform built specifically for Laravel. You connect your Git repo, push code, and Cloud handles everything—compute, databases, SSL, CDN, DDoS protection, autoscaling, and deployments.

Plan base fees:

• Starter: $0/month (pay per usage only)
• Growth: $20/month + usage
• Business: $200/month + usage

Compute pricing (Flex instances):

• 1 vCPU / 256MB RAM — $5/month
• 2 vCPU / 512MB RAM — $12/month
• 2 vCPU / 1GB RAM — $18/month
• 4 vCPU / 2GB RAM — $36/month

A key feature is hibernation—your app automatically scales to zero when not receiving traffic, and you only pay for the seconds it's running. This is enabled by default on the Starter plan and makes a huge difference for development environments, staging, and low-traffic apps.

Database pricing:

• Serverless Postgres (powered by Neon): $0.106/hour for CPU + $0.50/GB/month storage. A lightly used database with hibernation might cost $1-3/month. A moderately active one: $5-15/month.
• Managed MySQL: Flex instances from ~$15/month, Pro from ~$50/month.

Other resources:

• Valkey (Redis-compatible cache): from ~$5/month
• Object Storage (Cloudflare R2): $0.02/GB/month, free data transfer
• Reverb (WebSockets): $5-200/month depending on connection limits
• Bandwidth: included with compute allowances, $0.10/GB overage

Realistic cost scenarios on Laravel Cloud:

What you don't manage: Anything. No servers, no SSL, no Nginx, no security patches, no deployment pipelines, no scaling configuration. Push code, it works.

The Comparison

Here's the honest side-by-side for a typical small-to-medium Laravel application in production:

When Laravel Cloud Is Worth the Premium

The cost difference between self-managed and fully managed is real—roughly $20-40/month for a comparable app. Whether that's worth it depends on your situation:

Laravel Cloud makes sense when:

• You're a solo founder or small team without DevOps expertise
• Your time is better spent building product than managing servers
• You want autoscaling without configuring it yourself
• You're running multiple environments (staging, production, preview) and want hibernation to keep costs down
• You value the safety net of a platform that handles security patches and SSL renewals automatically

Self-managed or Forge makes sense when:

• You have existing DevOps knowledge and enjoy infrastructure work
• You're running many applications on a single server (Forge + one VPS can host multiple Laravel apps)
• You need specific server configurations that managed platforms don't support
• Budget is the primary constraint and you're comfortable with the time trade-off
• Your traffic patterns are predictable enough that autoscaling isn't needed

A Note on Scaling Costs

All usage-based platforms (Laravel Cloud, Railway, Render) can get expensive at scale. A high-traffic application with sustained compute, large databases, and heavy bandwidth will cost more on a managed platform than on self-managed infrastructure. This is the fundamental trade-off—you're paying for convenience and managed operations.

However, most early-stage applications never reach the point where this matters. If you're choosing where to host your first Laravel app or your MVP, optimising for the cheapest possible server is usually the wrong priority. Ship first, optimise costs later when you have traffic worth optimising for.

The Bottom Line

You can host a Laravel application for as little as $5/month on a self-managed VPS, or spend $30-80/month for a fully managed experience on Laravel Cloud. Both are valid choices. The right answer depends on whether you'd rather spend time or money—and how much of each you have.

For what it's worth, the Laravel ecosystem is unusually well-served here. Most frameworks don't have an official, first-party hosting platform that's genuinely competitive. The fact that you can go from git push to a production URL with SSL, CDN, and autoscaling in under 60 seconds—regardless of what you think about the pricing—is remarkable infrastructure that didn't exist two years ago.