Laravel Reverb hosting: Laravel Cloud, your own server or a hosted service
Where a Laravel app’s WebSockets can run: managed Reverb on Laravel Cloud, Reverb on a Forge or Docker server, or a hosted Pusher-compatible service. Prices and the work each one leaves you.
Laravel Reverb is a WebSocket server written for Laravel, and it speaks the Pusher protocol. That gives a Laravel app three places to run its WebSockets: managed Reverb on Laravel Cloud, Reverb on a server you manage, or a hosted Pusher-compatible service. Your broadcast events, routes/channels.php and Laravel Echo code are the same in all three; what differs is the price and the work left to you.
The three options
| Managed Reverb on Laravel Cloud | Reverb on your own server | Hosted Pusher-compatible service | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who runs Reverb | Laravel Cloud | You (Forge, Docker or by hand) | The service (Hibira, Pusher) |
| Where your app must be | On Laravel Cloud | Anywhere | Anywhere |
| Scaling past one server | Resize the cluster | Redis pub/sub and a load balancer, set up by you | Handled by the service |
| Price | By connection tier (table below) | A server plus your time | Fixed monthly plans |
| Laravel config | Variables injected for you | BROADCAST_CONNECTION=reverb | BROADCAST_CONNECTION=pusher |
Laravel Cloud
Your own server
Hosted service
Managed Reverb on Laravel Cloud
Laravel Cloud creates Reverb clusters from its dashboard: you pick a region and a connection size, attach the cluster to an environment, and Cloud injects the REVERB_ variables. Clusters can be split across several apps.
| Concurrent connections | Messages a day | Price a month |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | 200,000 | $5 |
| 200 | 400,000 | $10 |
| 500 | 1 million | $25 |
| 2,000 | 8 million | $100 |
| 5,000 | 16 million | $200 |
Every size has a 10 KB message limit, and Laravel Cloud's own plan is billed on top (from $5 a month plus usage). Figures are from Laravel Cloud's pricing docs and its WebSockets docs, checked on 2026-10-26.
This is the simplest choice when the app already lives on Laravel Cloud. It is not an option for an app hosted somewhere else.
Reverb on your own server
Reverb is free software, so the cost is the server and the time. The Reverb documentation lists what production needs:
- A process manager such as Supervisor to keep
php artisan reverb:startrunning. - A reverse proxy such as Nginx in front of it, terminating TLS.
- A higher open-file limit, because each connection holds a file descriptor, and the
ext-uvevent loop above about 1,000 connections. - Redis and
REVERB_SCALING_ENABLED=trueonce you run more than one Reverb server, plus a load balancer in front.
Forge can set up the Reverb daemon on servers it manages, which removes most of the first three steps. Monitoring, upgrades and being paged when it stops are still yours.
This fits teams that already run servers with monitoring, or apps whose broadcast events must stay on their own infrastructure.
A hosted Pusher-compatible service
Laravel's pusher broadcast driver talks to any Pusher-protocol service. Set the host in .env, point Echo at it, and the service runs the WebSocket servers wherever your app is hosted.
With Hibira, the free plan has 100 connections and 200,000 messages a day; paid plans start at $19 a month for 500 connections and 1 million published messages a day. A publish counts once however many subscribers receive it. Servers are in Hong Kong, which suits users in East and Southeast Asia. The Laravel Reverb comparison and the Laravel Echo guide have the details and the code.
Choosing
- Your app is on Laravel Cloud: managed Reverb, unless your users are far from the regions it offers.
- You already run servers and want no third party: Reverb on your own server.
- Your app is on a VPS, shared hosting, Vapor or another platform and you would rather not run a WebSocket server: a hosted Pusher-compatible service.
Switching between them later is a change of BROADCAST_CONNECTION and a few .env values.
Common questions
Can I use Laravel Reverb without Laravel Cloud?
Yes. Reverb is open source and runs on any server with PHP. Laravel Cloud only offers a managed version of it for apps hosted there.
How much does managed Laravel Reverb cost?
On Laravel Cloud, from $5 a month for 100 concurrent connections up to $200 a month for 5,000, plus the Laravel Cloud plan itself.
Do I need Redis for Laravel Reverb?
Only when you run more than one Reverb server: Redis shares messages between them. A single Reverb server does not need it.
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