A Fly.io alternative for Laravel in Europe.
Fly.io runs your app as fast-starting micro-VMs on servers it operates in 17 regions, stops them when idle and bills per second, with a launcher that sets Laravel up for you. Brewless runs your Laravel app serverless too, but in your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts, two European-owned clouds.
Facts checked on 20 October 2026. See the sources.
Fly.io and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Fly.io | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Fly.io, Inc., United States. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | Fly Machines: micro-VMs built from a Docker image, started and stopped by the Fly proxy with traffic. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Fly.io’s own infrastructure. | Yours: your own Scaleway project and bunny.net account. Brewless is the control plane and is not in the path of your visitors. |
| Infrastructure | Bare-metal servers that Fly.io operates. | Scaleway (France) for your app, bunny.net (Slovenia) for the edge in front of it. Both European companies. |
| Regions in Europe | Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Frankfurt and London, next to regions in the Americas, Africa and Asia-Pacific. | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. |
| Scales to zero | Yes: machines stop or suspend when idle, and fly launch sets that up by default. | Yes, when you set the minimum to zero. |
| Price | Per second: a shared machine from $2.19 a month, about 4 to 15% more in European regions. No free tier; a trial of 2 hours or 7 days. | 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 | fly launch recognises Laravel and writes a Dockerfile and fly.toml; the scheduler and queue workers run as process groups and migrations as a release command. | 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 Fly.io does well
- Billing per second with scale to zero built in, including a fast suspend.
- Many regions, and apps that run in several at once.
- Each machine is its own VM, with its own kernel.
- A launcher that recognises Laravel and writes the Docker setup.
Where Brewless is different
European clouds
Brewless runs on Scaleway (France) and bunny.net (Slovenia). Fly.io is an American company running its own servers.
Your own accounts
With Brewless, the Scaleway project and bunny.net account are yours and bill you directly. On Fly.io, the infrastructure and the bill are Fly.io’s.
No Dockerfile to keep
Brewless builds your Laravel app into a container itself, from your repository.
Managed databases in your account
Your database is a managed service at Scaleway, in your own project.
Which one fits?
Pick Fly.io if
- You want your app close to visitors on several continents.
- You are at home with Docker and want to tune the machines.
- You run more than Laravel on one platform.
Pick Brewless if
- You want your Laravel app with European-owned providers.
- You want the infrastructure in your own name.
- You would rather not keep a Dockerfile and fly.toml.
Moving from Fly.io to Brewless
Your fly.toml maps onto brewless.yml: the app process becomes your web container, the worker process your queue, the cron process is not needed because the schedule is read from your app, and the release command stays a release command. The Dockerfile is not needed. Copy your database to Scaleway, test, then move your domain.
Questions about Fly.io
- Does Fly.io have regions in Europe?
- Yes: Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris and Frankfurt in the EU, and London. Prices in those regions are a few percent higher than in Ashburn.
- Can Fly.io scale to zero?
- Yes. Machines stop or suspend when idle and start again on the next request; a stopped machine costs only its disk.
- Fly.io or Brewless?
- Both run your app only while it is used. Fly.io runs any Docker app on its own servers worldwide; Brewless runs Laravel in your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts in Europe.
Sources
The facts about Fly.io 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
- 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
- Bref alternative Open-source framework for AWS Lambda
- 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.