A Bref alternative on European clouds.
Bref is the open-source framework for running PHP and Laravel on AWS Lambda in your own AWS account, with Bref Cloud as an optional paid dashboard. Brewless shares the idea, serverless and in your own accounts, but runs on Scaleway and bunny.net, two European-owned clouds, with builds, releases and rollbacks included.
Facts checked on 20 October 2026. See the sources.
Bref and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Bref | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Open source (MIT licence) in the brefphp organisation, by Matthieu Napoli. Bref Cloud is a paid service on top. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | Serverless on AWS Lambda, deployed with serverless.yml and CloudFormation. Laravel runs through the Bref Laravel bridge. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Yours: your own AWS account. | Yours: your own Scaleway project and bunny.net account. Brewless is the control plane and is not in the path of your visitors. |
| Infrastructure | Amazon Web Services (United States). | Scaleway (France) for your app, bunny.net (Slovenia) for the edge in front of it. Both European companies. |
| Regions in Europe | The AWS region you choose, European ones included. | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. |
| Scales to zero | Yes: Lambda runs per request and costs nothing when idle. | Yes, when you set the minimum to zero. |
| Price | The framework is free. Bref Cloud is free for personal use, then $15, $39 or $99 a month, or a custom price. AWS bills you directly. | Free to try with one application. Paid plans from €15 a month, with unlimited environments on every plan. Scaleway and bunny.net bill you directly, and Brewless takes no percentage of that. |
| For Laravel | Queues on SQS, the scheduler as a once-a-minute event, Octane, Artisan through bref command, and a guide for moving from Vapor. | Migrations as their own step in every deploy, queues on Scaleway Queues, the schedule read from your app, Artisan on the live release, and brewless init to start from a vapor.yml. |
What Bref does well
- Free and open source, mature and widely used.
- Runs in your own AWS account; Bref is not in the path of your traffic.
- Costs nothing while your app is idle.
- Deep Laravel support, and a guide for leaving Vapor.
Where Brewless is different
European clouds
Brewless runs on Scaleway (France) and bunny.net (Slovenia). Bref runs on AWS.
A container instead of a function
Your app runs as an ordinary container on Scaleway Serverless Containers, so the limits of a Lambda function, such as 15 minutes per invocation, do not apply.
Builds included
Brewless builds your release from the repository and runs migrations as their own step, with a dashboard and rollbacks.
Resources set up for you
Brewless creates the database, queue and bucket of an environment at Scaleway from brewless.yml.
Which one fits?
Pick Bref if
- You are committed to AWS.
- You want an open-source tool you can use without any service.
- You want Lambda’s pay-per-request model.
Pick Brewless if
- You want serverless Laravel on European-owned clouds.
- You want builds, releases and rollbacks without assembling them yourself.
- You want a dashboard for your team and your environments.
Moving from Bref to Brewless
Your serverless.yml functions map onto brewless.yml: the web function becomes your web container, queue workers become your queue, and the schedule is read from your app. Remove the Bref bridge, copy your database to Scaleway, test, then move your domain.
Questions about Bref
- Is Bref free?
- The framework is free and open source under the MIT licence. Bref Cloud, the optional dashboard, is free for personal use and paid for commercial use. AWS bills your usage directly.
- Does Bref run outside AWS?
- No. Bref is built for AWS Lambda.
- Bref or Brewless?
- Both run Laravel serverless in your own accounts. Pick Bref for AWS, and Brewless for Scaleway and bunny.net in Europe.
Sources
The facts about Bref on this page come from its own pages, read on 20 October 2026. Prices and features change, so check them before you decide. Spotted something out of date? Mail contact@coding.agency.
Other alternatives
- Laravel Vapor alternative Serverless platform on AWS Lambda; no new signups
- Laravel Cloud alternative Managed platform on AWS
- Laravel Forge alternative Server management
- Laravel Envoyer alternative Zero-downtime deployments to your servers
- Clever Cloud alternative Platform-as-a-service
- Scalingo alternative Platform-as-a-service
- Upsun alternative Platform-as-a-service on several clouds
- Koyeb alternative Serverless platform on its own servers
- Northflank alternative Container platform, own cloud or yours
- Render alternative Managed cloud platform
- Railway alternative Usage-billed cloud platform
- Fly.io alternative Micro-VMs on its own servers
- Heroku alternative Platform-as-a-service on AWS
- Sevalla alternative Managed app platform
- Coolify alternative Self-hosted PaaS, open source
- Dokku alternative Self-hosted PaaS, open source
- Ploi alternative Server management
- RunCloud alternative Server management
- Cloudways alternative Managed servers
- Google Cloud Run alternative Serverless containers on Google Cloud
Try Brewless with your Laravel app
We open access to Laravel teams in small batches. Brewless is free to try with one application, production included; you start paying when you want your own domain or more.