Five Tips to Save Money on Laravel Cloud in 2026

Laravel Cloud is the best way to ship and scale your full stack applications. And one of the ways we want to make it easier for you to ship and scale your applications is make it cheaper for you. So, here's five tips on how to save money shipping and scaling your applications on Laravel Cloud. The first is one of those things that just seems like common sense, but it's something that we wanted to make sure that Laravel Cloud has, and that's spending limits. So, one, you can set a specific limit to alert you to say, "Hey, you're about to spend this much." Or you've already spent this much. And that might be fine for you or your applications. But, we also have a way to stop the compute. In this case, everything that is costing you money is going to be shut down once it gets to this particular limit. And so, this is helpful if you say, "I only want to spend this much." You're not going to pay a cent more. Okay, number two. And this isn't even really the best one. I'm saving that for number three. Being able to have a usage page that shows you exactly what you're spending. You can even calculate this to say, "Okay, what did I spend last month?" This is helpful to save money when you're looking at, "Okay, I said I only want to spend $300 last month, but I actually spent $314.72. What application was running?" This is your budget or your checkbook, if you will. With those times when you need to take a look through your databases, your cache, your web sockets, and say, "Okay, do I have something running still up that I didn't intend to be still up? Maybe it's costing you money and you didn't even know it." The goal with this usage is to give you insights, to be completely transparent, say, "This is how much you spent. This is how much you're on track to spend. This is what you're going to spend." Just so you know, is there anything that doesn't look right? Cuz you know that more than we know that. Maybe it's a particular application that you can take a look and say, "Okay, yeah, that compute is a little bit overkill for that particular application that I need. Maybe I can scale that down." I like to think of this is all those social ads that you might see where it's like, "Yeah, I didn't realize I still had three Netflix charges on multiple different emails that I don't even use anymore." Well, that's what the usage page should be for. Maybe you still have resources that aren't even connected to applications. Again, we at Laravel don't know if you actually need those resources, but this is some insight to help you save money in this area. All right, number three, and this is kind of a combination of three and four. It's scale to zero. It's one of the biggest things that we like to point out here at Laravel Cloud. Because you have app clusters. App clusters are fixed compute that enables you to select specific settings that are capped at specific amount and have scale to zero ready to go. Or you have always-on compute that again are capped at specific settings. You automatically know what you're going to pay each month for both the always-on and the scale to zero. At least you know what you will pay at the very most for scale to zero. So, if I select a scale to zero app cluster, let's say this one that's capped at $12 a month, I know I'm only going to pay at least up to $12 a month and not a penny more. But, I click save on here and then I'm going to select that app cluster again and select scale to zero. Now, I have the ability to say after a certain number of minutes, I want this app cluster that is going to cost me up to $12 a month. There's a reason why it says up to. I want to scale down. I want to sleep after five, maybe 10, maybe 20 minutes. So, this is saying if your application does not receive traffic within that specific set of time, it's going to scale down. It's going to go to sleep. So, now you have an app cluster that if it was always-on, it would be $12 a month, but since it can go to sleep, it could be a lot cheaper. So, I would set this as if your only goal is to save money as low as possible. Maybe three minutes, maybe five minutes. Whatever works for you and for your application's needs. And then combining it with that usage page and maybe like even the metrics page to see can I even afford to push that number down lower. The neat thing is this scale to zero is not just like any other cold start where it takes, you know, 30 seconds to spin up once it's at zero, once it's sleeping. No, it takes up to 500 milliseconds, usually less. That's up to 500 milliseconds. Again, usually less. But not only can app clusters scale to zero, manage queues can scale to zero as well as databases and cache. So we'll count those resources scale to zero as number four. Let's jump to number five. For number five, I'm going to go into my resources page because this is something that you usually do if you're not on a managed infrastructure. You usually share resources. So I have a bunch of different databases here. This is not exactly saving me money cuz if I was to go back into my usage tab again, those databases is where the chunk of my change is going. Uh just in this month alone, but if I was to go into past month, yeah, $114 out of my $314 is going to databases. I can save money here, right? So anything that is in my resources tab, databases, cache, object storage, and even web sockets can be shared. They can be pooled resources. So if I was to create a new application or even just go into an existing application that I have, for example, this one right here. Uh if I was to just go ahead and like detach this database and like detach this web sockets right here. What would happen if instead of adding a new database and creating one, I just attached it to an existing one like this right here. Connecting that database. And of course, I would probably want to connect it in a new database just within that cluster, right? Well, we can do that, too. In that database that I want to share with another application, I can create a new database. This is maybe a wired two right there. Perfect. Create the database. And going back to the application, I'm going to replace this database with the one that I'm sharing. So, in this here, I'm going to do wired two. And same thing with this web sockets connection, instead of it being a new web socket cluster that's costing me $5 a month extra, maybe I can share with something that doesn't necessarily need to be a new cluster. I can create a new web socket application within that cluster to say, "Okay, maybe this is wired two." And then all of a sudden, I can have specific settings, and this is going to distribute this evenly between the whole cluster, but it's saving me money. And the same thing can be done for caches as well as object storage. Where yes, maybe if your goal was not to save money, but just to have things cleanly separated, maybe you don't share resources. But if your goal is to just save money, again, this is the five tips on saving money on Laravel Cloud video, sharing resources as number five is the best way to do that. So, that's it. Five ways to save money on Laravel Cloud because again, my goal, our goal is to save you money. We want you to be able to ship and scale applications the way that works best for you and for your application. So, if your only hesitancy to jump [music] into Laravel Cloud is, "Oh, it costs too much money." Maybe this changes your mind. So, let's ship together. Let's ship cheaper.