A Heroku alternative for Laravel in Europe.
Heroku is the platform that made git push deployments common: dynos, buildpacks, a Procfile and a large add-on marketplace, owned by Salesforce and running on AWS. In February 2026 it said it is moving to a sustaining engineering model. Brewless runs your Laravel app in your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts, two European-owned clouds.
Facts checked on 20 October 2026. See the sources.
Heroku and Brewless at a glance
| Topic | Heroku | Brewless |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Heroku, part of Salesforce, Inc., San Francisco, United States. | Coding Agency, Meppel, the Netherlands. |
| How your app runs | Dynos: managed containers built with buildpacks, with web and worker processes in a Procfile, and autoscaling on Performance and Private dynos. | Serverless containers: your app starts with traffic and stops when it is quiet. There are no servers to manage. |
| Whose account | Heroku’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 | Amazon Web Services. | Scaleway (France) for your app, bunny.net (Slovenia) for the edge in front of it. Both European companies. |
| Regions in Europe | Europe in the Common Runtime; Dublin and Frankfurt for Private Spaces, and London. | Paris, Amsterdam, Warsaw and Milan. |
| Scales to zero | Only Eco dynos, which sleep after 30 minutes without traffic; paid dynos run, and are billed, while scaled above zero. | Yes, when you set the minimum to zero. |
| Price | Eco $5 and Basic $7 a month; Standard dynos from $25 and Performance dynos from $250 a month, billed per second. Postgres from $5 a month. | 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 | The PHP buildpack names Laravel; a Laravel guide, a release phase for migrations, worker processes in the Procfile and the Scheduler add-on every 10 minutes at most. | 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 Heroku does well
- A mature, well documented git push workflow.
- A large marketplace of add-ons.
- A release phase that stops a deploy when migrations fail.
- Private and Shield Spaces for isolated, compliance-minded workloads.
Where Brewless is different
European clouds
Brewless runs on Scaleway (France) and bunny.net (Slovenia). Heroku runs on AWS and is part of Salesforce.
Your own accounts
With Brewless, the Scaleway project and bunny.net account are yours and bill you directly. On Heroku, the infrastructure and the bill are Heroku’s.
Scale to zero in production
Brewless containers can stop when nobody visits, also for a paid production app.
The schedule every minute
Brewless reads the schedule from your app and runs tasks at the minute they are due, without an add-on.
Which one fits?
Pick Heroku if
- You want the classic PaaS with the most add-ons.
- You already work with Salesforce.
- You run several languages on one platform.
Pick Brewless if
- You want your Laravel app with European-owned providers.
- You want the infrastructure in your own name.
- You want containers that stop when it is quiet.
Moving from Heroku to Brewless
Your Procfile maps onto brewless.yml: the web process is handled for you, the release phase becomes release commands and worker processes become your queues. Scheduler jobs come from your Laravel schedule. Config vars become variables at Brewless. Copy your database from Heroku Postgres to Scaleway, test, then move your domain.
Questions about Heroku
- Is Heroku still developed?
- In February 2026 Heroku announced a move to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability and support, and stopped offering new Enterprise Account contracts to new customers. Existing card customers keep their pricing.
- Does Heroku have a free plan?
- Not on its pricing page. Eco dynos cost $5 a month for a shared pool of hours and sleep when idle.
- Heroku or Brewless?
- Heroku hosts apps in many languages on its own platform on AWS. Brewless deploys Laravel into your own Scaleway and bunny.net accounts in Europe.
Sources
The facts about Heroku 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
- 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.