How long does $5 last on Laravel Cloud?

If you hadn't already heard, Laravel Cloud now has $5 of free trial credits for any new account. You can watch that whole video right up here. But in this video, what I want to do is walk through your questions. How far does $5 actually get you when you're talking about hosting a Laravel app on Laravel Cloud? This was such a popular question from you all that we wanted to make a specific video and even uh some documentations you can find right up there. How far does $5 actually go? So, to start you off, I'm just going to give you the TLDDR. Here's four different categories of how far $5 will get you on the Laravel cloud trial credit. And these are meant to be realistic expectations for what your app might cost depending on what kind of life cycle your app is in. We're not trying to just say, "Hey, here's $5 of credit that's going to last you a good 5 minutes of your app being online. So, if you want to stay until the later part of this video, I'm going to be diving into the actual numbers of what those compute costs look like for these four different categories. But to start it off, how far does $5 actually go?" So you can see here in our documentation, we have four different scenarios if you will. A weekend tinkerer, an active side project, a full stack app with my SQL and then everything always on. Now when you are starting the trial credits within Laravel cloud, there's some recommendations that we usually say and things that we've already enabled so you don't have to think about them. That's hibernation within your app compute and that's Laravel Postgress which allows you to scale down to zero and not have your app cost anything if it's not actually serving your users. And so we can tinker is going to be best case scenario. If you're running for about an hour per day over the course of a month, you can last that $5 for a whole four months. This would be compute and serverless Postgres and again it's awake about one hour per day. But before we go any further, I did want to clarify hibernation and what that means within the app compute and within Laravel serverless Postgress. Within the app compute, hibernation typically lasts 5 to 20 seconds in order to wake up your application from hibernation. That's not a small number, but it's manageable depending on your application and your use case and how far you want to stretch that $5. This application I have is already hibernating. So, I'm going to show you exactly in real time what this looks like to wake it up. So I'm going to click on this and I'm just going to start talking to you now within the Laravel serverless Postgres within that hibernation. Laravel serverless Postgres hibernates and scales down to zero. The difference and now we have our application up and running and out of hibernation. The difference is Laravel serverless Postgres waking up from hibernation only takes a couple hundred milliseconds at most. Okay. What about if you have an active side project? Something that you do have users and that's great. We're happy for you. But what happens if it's more than just one hour per day? Well, let's say if you have a compute and serverless Postgres that's awake for about four hours per day. So maybe it's, you know, 4 hours over the weekend, maybe two hours per day. This could stretch a little bit longer during the week days. Depending on what that side project looks like for you in terms of your traffic, that could last you about five weeks. So that $5 a trial credit could last you a month and more. Now, here's where it's a good thing. if your app is past that side project phase, but it is going to cost you a little bit more in that sense. That $5 trial credit is not going to last you as long if you do have a full stack app with, let's say, my SQL that needs to be on as often as possible. And so that full stack app would be compute for that application on more often than hibernating with Laravel MySQL, which does not hibernate at all. Your database is always going to be on. Maybe you have long-standing cues that need to be hitting the database during that time as well as having a Laravel Valky addition to your application. In that case, $5 is going to last you about 12 days. We'll get into the specifics on what that compute time might look like and break it down a little bit more at the end of the video if you want to stick around. And then lastly, before we do that detailed breakdown, what would it cost? How long would that $5 last you if you just kept everything on 100% of the time? You're not using Postgress to scale down. You're not turning hibernation on, you have uh reverb even and valky. What would that look like? Well, it's still not as crazy as you would think. It's not going to be 5 minutes of uptime for that $5. That's $5 is going to last you roughly about 3 days, which would add up to around $40 per month and you get that first 3 days, that first $5 free. So, those are those four realistic scenarios, those four categories, if you will, of where your app might be and how far that $5 trial credit could last you. So, let's get a little bit more in depth and take a look at what those specific numbers might look like. I do want to clarify all these numbers that we're looking at is the default options for how long that $5 trial credit might last you on Laravel Cloud. What this means is the app cluster would be the one CPU 512 megabytes of RAM. You could essentially break that down even lower if you would like. And just to visually show that hibernation is going to be enabled by default, and you do have the option to select how long until that application hibernates. The lower number you have here, of course, the more money you save. So the number breakdowns that we just talked about in the scenarios and the detailed breakdown that we're about to talk about depends on if you have hibernation enabled or disabled for your application. Laraveville valky would be the cache option. Laravel reverb would be the websocket option when we take a look at those. All right, detailed breakdown coming up. Let's start with the first scenario. Weekend tinkerer. This is best case scenario. This is you just wanting to try out Laravel cloud and see how long those $5 of trial credit can last you. Let's say in a weekend tinkerer kind of application you have hibernation enabled on the application cluster as well as Laravel serverless Postgres. So the app only wakes up on request. The Postgres actually suspends when it's idle. What does that mean? Well, you're probably going to be using it maybe like an hour a day on average. Some days more, some days less, which means it will cost you around $1.27 a month. I'm going to leave up these numbers just so you can pause and take a look at what those calculations actually look like when it comes to compute, Postgres compute and Postgres storage. So, how long does that $5 last you? Well, around 3.9 months, around 16 weeks again, if you have your application running for around an hour a day on average. Second, active side project. This is for you, those artisans who have that project that it might make you a lot of money, it might not. But sometimes you might want it to scale up, sometimes you might not want it to scale up at all. And that always depends on your specific situation. But let's say roughly you have hibernation still enabled for app compute. Let's say you have hibernation enabled for serverless Postgres, which means if there are users, well, it's going to stay active. It's going to stay up and running, but maybe during the weekdays there's not as many people trying out your application. it scales down and you're not paying a single scent. So usage 4 hours a day on weekdays, maybe two hours a day on the weekends. It's in that active development phase. Let's say the storage is going to take around maybe 1 gigabyte. In this case scenario, with all these calculations, you're looking at around $3.75 a month. So that $5 of free Laravel cloud trial credit is going to last you around 5.5 weeks which is pretty good which means you have the ability to you know scale up or scale down that application in size. Maybe you want to upgrade your Laravel cloud account within that time. Maybe your application starts getting hundreds of thousands of users and you're ready to go now on Laravel Cloud while still having that $5 of trial credit last you for that active development phase. Well, let's start getting into realistic numbers. This is a project that is up and running. you have hundreds of users already and you need reliability. Well, Laravel cloud can still work great for you and that $5 of trial credit is not going to be meaningless by any means. So, let's say you have a full stack app and you're going to use Laravel MySQL which does not have hibernation. So, when it's running 100% of the time, it's cheaper than if Postgress was running 100% of the time. But Postgress does have that hibernation. So, this is the trade-off between Laravel Postgress and Laravel MySQL. Let's say your compute and Laravel MySQL. So it's not hibernating and you have Laravel Valky. So no Postgres and no reverb for compute only. MySQL and Valky are going to always be on. There's no hibernation. Let's say your application is running for 8 hours a day weekdays for compute which is a pretty generous application running. So let's say your users are using your application during their work week 100% of the time. And with around 2 GB of MySQL storage, you're looking at $11.89 89 a month to host this particular application on Laraveville Cloud. So, how long is $5 of credit going to last you? Eh, around 12.6 days. Again, not meaningless at all. All right, let's go to the the big kahuna, if you will. The everything always on. Let's say your application needs to run consistently. You don't even have hibernation disabled for your application. Again, these numbers are expecting that you are running the default options for the Laraveo Cloud free trial. and then just saying how far does that $5 last you using this level of compute. So the numbers might be a little bit different if you were looking to upgrade and move to a higher compute instance. So in this scenario everything on no hibernation the worst case let's say you signed up for Laraveo cloud you got the $5 of free trial credit you put an app on but you disabled hibernation because you thought hey maybe this would be good to just try this out. This is exactly how much this is going to cost you at the very very highest again worst case scenario because compute is going to be always on. These are all the trial resources that you can actually provision for one application. You have a compute that is always on $5 a month. You have my SQL compute always on $5.50 a month because it's never going to turn off. There's no hibernation. Same with MySQL storage. let's say 5 GB of MySQL storage for your application, which is still less than what we are calculating around here, which is 2 GB for that full stack application running 8 hours a day during the weekdays. Let's say you enable Laravel Valky for cache and Laravel Reverb for websockets. All of that is going to cost $20.50 for the month. So, if you did move to the Laravel cloud starter plan and did want to increase app compute or even my SQL compute, then it's going to be different. This is just the default pricing for the Laravel free trial. So $5 would last you around 7 days. One week of having an app that is always on. There's no hibernation. There's no checking to see if it actually needs to be on for your users. If everything was just left on with all of the resources provisioned, that $5 of credit is still going to last you one week in what we would say is the worst case scenario. But again, still pretty good case if your application needs that kind of power. And that's it. $5 is going to last you a pretty long time. The $5 of credit within Laravel Cloud that is I can't speak for much of anything else in our world. But at least on Laravel Cloud, that $5 of free trial credit is going to last you quite a bit of time. Whether it's a couple months, couple weeks, or even just 7 days, your Larvo application now has the ability to be served to whatever users you have. And now that you're on Laravel Cloud, it's so much easier to just autoscale that application in the future if and when your application needs it. So, start shipping something on Laravel Cloud. That $5 free trial credits, it's going to get you pretty far.