Most of the apps you host aren't busy most of the time. Staging, side projects, client demos, internal tools: they sit idle for hours but still bill for compute on most platforms. Laravel Cloud's answer, rolled out between June and July 2026, is to let the entire stack go to sleep and wake it fast enough that nobody notices.
Also Read: Laravel Cloud Adds Python, Go & Node.js Support (2026) - News
What changed
1 June: new Flex compute that scales to zero
A new generation of Flex compute sleeps when your app is idle and wakes in under 500 milliseconds when a request arrives. Laravel says the old implementation took around 10 seconds to wake, so the new one is roughly 20 times faster. In the September multi-language demo, Laravel quoted wake times of about 200 milliseconds.
Crucially, the whole stack sleeps and wakes together: Flex compute, Serverless Postgres and Laravel Valkey. Scheduled tasks keep firing and queued jobs keep processing while the environment is asleep. New Flex apps get scale to zero automatically.
20 July: MySQL joins in
Laravel MySQL Flex databases can now scale to zero too. Compute suspends while storage stays online, so no data is ever at risk. A proxy in front of each cluster holds the first incoming connection while the database resumes, then passes it through. Laravel says that adds only a few hundred milliseconds to the first query.
You choose the idle window, from one minute up to one hour, or never if you'd rather keep it awake. It's available on Flex sizes in every region. Existing databases keep their current size and price unless you switch.
The pricing refresh
Scale to zero arrived with new plans on 1 June:
- Starter plan: $5 a month, which includes $5 of usage credit, and the first month is free.
- Every paid plan now includes $5 of monthly usage credit.
- Spending limits: set a hard monthly cap. Once reached, Cloud stops provisioning new resources, and alerts fire at 50%, 80%, 90% and 100% along the way.
- Custom domains are counted per organisation; extra domains cost $0.25 per domain per month.
Earlier in the year (10 March), Laravel also started giving new sign-ups $5 of free credit valid for 14 days.
Who benefits most
- Agencies with many small client sites: idle sites cost close to nothing in compute.
- Preview environments: every PR preview now sleeps between reviews (and previews are included on all plans since 25 September).
- Side projects: a hobby app on the Starter plan with a sleeping database is now a genuinely cheap way to run Laravel.
The catch
Sleeping has limits. A cold start of a few hundred milliseconds is fine for most traffic but not for a latency-critical API. You can protect a sleeping staging site from bots waking it with HTTP basic authentication (Growth plan and above). For always-on production workloads, keep a minimum replica count or use Pro compute.
FAQ
How fast does Laravel Cloud wake from scale to zero? Under 500 milliseconds, according to Laravel's docs, for compute, database and cache together.
Does MySQL scale to zero on Laravel Cloud? Yes, on Laravel MySQL Flex sizes since July 2026. Storage stays online and you set the idle window.
How much is the Laravel Cloud Starter plan? $5 a month including $5 of usage credit, with the first month free.
Do scheduled tasks run while the app sleeps? Yes. The scheduler keeps firing and queued jobs keep processing.
Related on The Web Tier
- Laravel Cloud managed queues rebuilt: FIFO and Flex/Pro
- Preview environments are now on every Laravel Cloud plan
Sources: Laravel Cloud changelog (Scale to Zero and New Pricing; MySQL Scale to Zero) · Everything we announced at Laracon US 2026 · Deploying Rails, Laravel, Go, Node and Python live session
