How to Get Started with Laravel 12 and Laravel Cloud

Laravel 12 is set as a maintenance release, meaning it builds on previous versions in terms of refining existing features rather than making major overhauls. Developers would appreciate this approach since updating their apps can be done with minimal effort and disruption, which is certainly useful in maintaining stability while working on active projects.

New Starter Kits

Along with many new features, new starter kits were introduced as one of the highlights of it is the new kits which are designed to enable development right away, using for example the new pre-configured templates feature. These kits are suited for a variety of frontend preferences.

React Starter Kit: Best for users who are well-acquainted with React ecosystems, this kit comes with Inertia.js, React 19, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn components.

Vuetify Starter Kit: Inertia.js is also used, but this version comes with Vuetify 3 Composition API, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, and shadcn-vue – perfect for Vue.js developers.

Livewire Starter Kit: Provides an easier way of having real-time interactions with minimal amounts of JavaScript through Livewire 3, Laravel Volt, Tailwind CSS, and Flux UI.

All these kits come with basic features out of the box such as authentication which includes login, registration, password reset, and even email verification, thus providing extensive setup time savings.

WorkOS AuthKit Variant

And for the developers utilizing more sophisticated authentication, these starter kits include a WorkOS variant that offers social authentication, passkeys, Single Sign-On (SSO), and is free with a cap of 1 million monthly active users. This may be an unconventional point, but it does shift the enterprise range security envelope of Laravel, thus raising the interest of big firms.

General Improvements

Although its novel functionalities are restricted, Laravel 12 still has some new bug fixes and perfomance optimizations to make sure that the framework runs efficiently. The framework also supports PHP versions 8.2 to 8.4 which might improve security and efficiency courtesy of the recent updates to PHP.

Comparison of Starter Kits in Laravel 12

Laravel Cloud

This part offers an in depth investigation into Laravel Cloud, a platform that has fully managed infrastructure and was established by the Laravel team on February 24, 2025. Its goals is aimed at easing the deployment and management of Laravel applications. Because of its recent launch, this overview combines available information to understand the tool that developers and teams are looking to utilize better.

Laravel Cloud provides a set of functionalities that minimizes the workload of DevOps activities and allows developers to concentrate on application building. Outlined below are its main features.

Pricing Table

Compute Pricing: Billing is per second while using Flex and Pro classes that are powered by AWS Graviton4. A revealed example is that a Flex instance of 1 CPU and 256MB RAM will cost $0.0067 per hour ($04.89 per month). On the other side, an 8 CPU 32 GB RAM Pro instance will cost $0.4448 per hour ($324.70 per month). Costs can be cut considerably with hibernation.

Database Pricing: For storage of Laravel Serverless Postgres, pricing starts from $0.04 per hour for a quarter vCPU and $1.50 per gb now. MySQL isn’t much different and the particulars are provided in pricing docs.

Usage Allowances: Sandbox provided incorporates 10 GB data transfer monthly and 1,000,000 requests with additional usages charged at $0.10 per GB and $1 per 1,000,000 requests.

Competition with Other Solutions

Laravel Cloud has a singular focus and thus competes with other Laravel tools and external hosting providers:

Laravel Forge: Provides more infrastructure control with server management, particularly for those developers who prefer manually setting up everything which is more time intensive when compared to Cloud.

Laravel Vapor: Suitable for small applications, though it's serverless, does not provide the resources or range of features available in Cloud.

Other Hosting Solutions: Such as Digital Ocean and AWS, provide ubiquitous cloud services that are more generalised and require significant additional work for Laravel optimised configurations compared to Cloud which has ready made stacks and integrations.

This analysis demonstrates the importance of Cloud in providing a fully managed solution, optimized for a specific framework while saving significant time and effort in changing the defaults.

Begin using Laravel Cloud by following this step by step:

1. Register at cloud.laravel.com.
2. Proceed to create a project where you choose your plan (ie. Sandbox which allows free usage based billing).
3. Link your Git account provider (GitHub, GitLab) to allow for automatic deployments.
4. Set up your settings which include runtime environment, database such as Serverless Postgres, and resources.
5. With Laravel Cloud, deployment can be done by simply pushing to your repository, with deployment expected to be of less than a minute.
6. At last, manage and monitor everything through the dashboard where you can also see the logs, metrics, and team collaboration features.

Conclusion

The start of Laravel Cloud is just around the corner and already it seems to be a revolution within the boundaries for Laravel developers. It boasts an effortless deployment procedure, exceptional features and a fair pricing model. Therefore, both individual developers and large teams can benefit from it. As the application expands, I am sure it will add more advanced features such business intelligence components and MySQL hosted databases. But before that, it is best to check out the sandbox plan and see what the application has to offer.