Laravel Magazine
Laravel Cloud Gets Scale-to-Zero: Your Idle Apps Stop Burning Money
Laravel Cloud just shipped Scale-to-Zero Flex compute, 20x faster cold starts, and a new four-tier pricing structure. Here is what changed and what it means for your hosting bill.
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Laravel Cloud Gets Scale-to-Zero: Your Idle Apps Stop Burning Money
If you have been running staging environments, hobby projects, or low-traffic production apps on Laravel Cloud, you have probably noticed one annoying thing: even when nobody is using the app, the compute keeps running and the bill keeps climbing. That changes with the latest update. Laravel Cloud just shipped Scale-to-Zero Flex compute, and it is exactly what it sounds like. Your entire application stack — web, workers, the works — can now sleep when there is no traffic and wake on the first incoming request. Scale-to-Zero: The Details When your app is idle, Laravel Cloud now spins the stack down completely. No compute running, no charges accumulating. When a request comes in, the stack wakes and handles it. The key metric here is cold start performance: under 500ms. Cold starts were historically the pain point of scale-to-zero hosting. Platforms that offered similar features often had cold starts in the 2-5 second range, which makes the first request feel broken rather than just slow...
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