Launcher: first impressions

My Laravel Forge subscription was about to expire, and regardless of being a happy customer, I was looking for a cheaper alternative. Having to pay $19 per month was a bit expensive for my little side projects.

A couple of weeks ago Launcher was announced by Pascal Baljet, and he gave me a beta invite, so I was happy to give it a try.

Launcher is a new service to deploy sites. It's kind of an alternative to Laravel Forge, but with the difference of having services and sites running in Docker containers, so every site and service is isolated within your VPS.

Currently, the service costs €4.99 per month, but it has purchasing power parity, so living in Mexico it costs around MX$55.00. A really good price that includes unlimited servers, unlimited sites, and unlimited deployments.

Deploying sites is effortless. Create a server, choose a repository, the PHP version, and you are ready to go. Currently, it supports Digital Ocean and Hetzner as cloud providers, but custom providers is a coming soon feature.

Launcher seems a great fit for my deployment needs, and I already moved all my side projects to it. Hopefully, support for more Cloud Providers, custom SSL certificates, and domain aliases features will be available soon.