Why Bref Instead of Vapor

Laravel Vapor is the official serverless deployment tool for Laravel. It works. I've used it on two client projects. But it costs $399 per year just for the subscription, and on top of that you're still paying for all the AWS resources underneath. What bothered me most wasn't the price though. It was the abstraction. Vapor manages your infrastructure behind the scenes, and when something goes sideways at 1am, you're digging through Vapor's CloudFormation stacks trying to figure out what it actually provisioned. I wanted more control.

So I started looking for alternatives. Bref has been around for a while now. It's an open-source project that gives you PHP runtimes for AWS Lambda. You get the same serverless model as Vapor, but you own every single piece of infrastructure. And because it's just Lambda layers, you can wire everything up with whatever IaC tool you prefer.

This post walks through deploying a full Laravel application to Lambda using Bref and Terraform.…