Preview environments used to be one of the main reasons to upgrade on Laravel Cloud. When they launched in August 2025 they were limited to the Growth, Business and Enterprise plans. As of 25 September 2026 they're included on every plan, Starter included, and they've been reworked.
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What a preview environment is
Open a pull request and Cloud builds an isolated, production-like copy of your app for that branch. Reviewers, clients and QA can click around the real thing before it's merged. When the PR merges or closes, the environment is removed.
What changed on 25 September
Fresh resources, not production
Every preview now gets its own fresh resources rather than pointing at your production database. That removes the classic risk of a preview's migration or seeder touching live data.
It sleeps between reviews
Previews run on scale-to-zero Flex sizes, so they sleep while nobody is looking at them and wake in under 500 milliseconds. A dozen open PRs no longer means a dozen always-on bills, which is presumably what made it affordable to include on every plan.
A proper home on the Deployments page
The Deployments page now lists every open pull request that has a preview, with its branch, latest commit and a link to open it.
Per-preview settings
Each preview has its own:
- Password protection, so bots and search engines can't find it (or wake it)
- Automatic deletion settings
- Environment variables, for pointing at sandbox payment keys, for example
PR comments
Cloud comments on the pull request when the preview deploys, with links to open it and view the deploy logs, so reviewers don't have to go looking.
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It works across frameworks
Preview environments are supported for every runtime Cloud offers: Laravel, Symfony, Next.js, Nuxt, TanStack Start, Node.js, Go and Python. In a monorepo with a Laravel API and a Nuxt frontend, each Cloud application gets its own preview.
Tips for useful previews
- Seed realistic data. Since previews start fresh, add a deploy command such as
php artisan migrate --seed --forceor a dedicated demo seeder. - Use sandbox keys. Override Stripe, mail and SMS credentials per preview so testers can't trigger real charges or emails.
- Password-protect client previews you share by link.
FAQ
Are Laravel Cloud preview environments free? They're included on every plan as of September 2026. You still pay for the compute and resources they use, but they sleep when idle.
Do preview environments use my production database? No. Each preview now gets fresh, separate resources.
When are preview environments deleted? Automatically when the pull request is merged or closed, unless you change that setting.
Related on The Web Tier
Sources: Laravel Cloud changelog: Preview Environment Improvements; Automated preview environments · Laravel Cloud runtimes: feature availability
