Cleavr

What Cleavr actually is

Cleavr is a server management and deployment panel for people who want a PaaS workflow without handing their servers to a PaaS. You bring your own VPS — Cleavr connects to DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, Linode, UpCloud, Vultr, or any box via its custom connector — and the panel provisions the server, installs the stack, and turns deploys into a button press or a git push. In our view it sits in the same category as Laravel Forge and Ploi: a control plane that makes an ordinary $6-per-month VPS behave like a managed platform, while the server stays yours.

The company behind it is small and bootstrapped. Cleavr was founded in 2017 by Ashok Gelal, is headquartered in Meridian, Idaho, and runs on roughly two people with about $220K in annual revenue as of late 2025. That context matters, and we will come back to it in the trade-offs. What the small team has built is not thin: the panel covers the full lifecycle — server provisioning, one-click app installs (Laravel, NodeJS, NuxtJS, NextJS, AdonisJS, Strapi, Directus, WordPress, PHP, phpMyAdmin, Soketi, static HTML), MySQL/PostgreSQL/MariaDB provisioning and management, Nginx and PHP configuration from the UI, free Let's Encrypt and ZeroSSL certificates, custom SSL, Fail2Ban and UFW hardening, SSH key handling, site isolation with system users, cron jobs, process monitors, PM2 cluster mode, deployment hooks, env management, redirects, site authentication, and notifications to Slack, Discord, Telegram, or email.

Deployments are the strongest part of the product. Push-to-deploy works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket; releases are zero-downtime with rollback to previous releases, canary-style deployments with health-check statistics, and GitHub Actions build integration. Multi-server deployments can sit behind a load balancer Cleavr provisions for you. Backups — database and filesystem — go to AWS S3, Wasabi, Backblaze, DigitalOcean Spaces, SFTP, or local storage. That is the working set most small teams actually need, and it is why people compare Cleavr to Forge at half the price.

Pricing: what you really pay

Cleavr's price page is one of the clearer ones in this category, with one caveat: the published rates are yearly-billing rates. Lite is $5.50 per month billed as $66 per year (the page states a $30-per-year saving versus monthly), covering up to one server with unlimited sites, web apps, and deployments, plus cron jobs and process monitors. Pro is $15 per month billed as $180 per year ($36 saving) — unlimited servers, server monitoring and log reports, database and filesystem backups, quick scripts and commands, GitHub Actions integration, service logs, site isolation system users, and load balancer support. Business is $30 per month billed as $360 per year ($72 saving), adding team members, team and resource management, and API access. A monthly-billing toggle exists, but the per-month rate behind it is not displayed on the page; budget on the annual numbers and check the checkout screen.

What gets our respect: the entry plan genuinely works. $5.50 per month for one server with unlimited apps and free SSL is a real product, not a crippled teaser, and the feature table on the pricing page is an actual table with checkmarks per plan rather than a marketing comparison. Students, non-profits, and people in low-income regions can get 50% off yearly plans by emailing proof, and open-source projects can be sponsored with free access. There is a 5-day free trial with Pro-level features and API access, no credit card required, plus a 7-day refund window after purchase. API access, notably, is trial-or-Business-only — a real limitation if you automate.

One comparison point worth stating plainly: Pro at $15 per month for unlimited servers with automated backups undercuts the comparable tiers of Forge and Ploi, which price backups, monitoring, and team features higher or lock them to upper tiers. Of course, you are also paying your VPS bills separately — a realistic setup is $5.50-15 per month to Cleavr plus $6-20 per month per server at Hetzner, DigitalOcean, or Vultr.

Performance & infrastructure

Cleavr is not infrastructure, so there is nothing of ours to benchmark — we have not run this panel through tests, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can assess is the machinery. Servers are provisioned through your provider's API and then fitted with an agent; independent comparisons note the agent and panel components consume roughly 200-500 MB of RAM on the managed server, which is worth remembering if you run 1 GB VPS instances. The stack is deliberately conventional: Nginx in front, your choice of PHP versions or Node runtimes, PM2 for process management, MySQL/PostgreSQL/MariaDB behind, and standard Git-based release directories. That conventionality is a feature — nothing exotic is running, and you can still SSH in and manage things by hand.

The deployment pipeline is production-grade in design: atomic releases with zero-downtime cutovers, rollback, custom deployment hooks for build steps and migrations, and health checks on canary rollouts. Monitoring covers server health, web app log reports, and service heartbeats, with cron and daemon process monitors. Security posture is the sensible default set — free SSL automation, Fail2Ban, UFW rules, SSH hardening, site isolation per system user. DNS record management (A, CNAME, TXT, MX) syncs with Cloudflare or DigitalOcean DNS, which removes one more tab-switching chore.

Where it falls short

The two-person company is the headline risk. There is no published uptime SLA for the panel itself — if Cleavr's control plane is down, you cannot use the UI or trigger deployments until it returns (your running servers are unaffected, which is the virtue of BYOS, but automated deploys stall). Support is email-based, and the Business tier is where team features and API access live, so there is no enterprise-grade support ladder to buy above it.

Second, the feature gating is opinionated. Backups and server monitoring start at Pro ($15 per month), and API access is restricted to trial and Business ($30 per month). Teams with several developers will find that everything team-shaped is locked to Business — cost scales by plan, not by seat, which is good for one person and less good for a ten-person org.

We would use the 5-day trial the way it is clearly meant: provision a real server from your own provider, run an actual deployment pipeline including a rollback, and watch memory use on a small instance before you commit. Five days is short for a full evaluation, but it is enough to confirm that your framework version and deploy hooks behave the way the docs promise.

Third, maturity. Cleavr's Next.js support is newer and thinner than its Laravel and PHP heritage, the ecosystem of one-click apps is smaller than Forge's, and the third-party review surface is sparse compared to incumbents. We treat the user-reported agent memory footprint and occasional rough edges as things to verify in the 5-day trial rather than deal-breakers — but verify them.

Who should pick this

We'd pick Cleavr for solo developers and small teams running PHP, Laravel, WordPress, or Node workloads on their own VPS fleet who want Forge-style workflows without Forge-style pricing. It fits best when you have one to a handful of servers, value backups and monitoring but do not want to pay $30-plus per month for them, and prefer predictable infrastructure costs over per-app PaaS billing. The one-server Lite plan at $5.50 per month is our pick for the cheapest serious deployment panel we know of.

We would look elsewhere if you need a guaranteed SLA, phone support, seat-based team administration with audit trails, or a mature serverless/edge story. In that case, Laravel Forge (deeper Laravel integration), Ploi (broader app catalog), or a managed platform like Laravel Cloud or Vercel is the better bet. And if the idea of a bootstrapped two-person company holding your deploy button keeps you up at night, that alone should decide it.

Key takeaways

• BYOS deployment panel (founded 2017, Meridian, Idaho; bootstrapped, ~2 people): provisions and manages VPS servers on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, AWS, Linode, UpCloud, Vultr, or custom.
• Transparent pricing on yearly billing: Lite $5.50/mo (one server), Pro $15/mo (unlimited servers, backups, monitoring), Business $30/mo (teams + API).
• Full deployment machinery: zero-downtime releases, rollback, canary with health checks, push-to-deploy from GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket, GitHub Actions support.
• Practical stack management from the UI: Nginx/PHP config, MySQL/PostgreSQL/MariaDB, free Let's Encrypt/ZeroSSL SSL, Fail2Ban/UFW, site isolation, cron, PM2 cluster mode.
• Backups to S3-compatible targets (S3, Wasabi, Backblaze, DO Spaces, SFTP, local) are a Pro-tier feature; API access is trial-or-Business only.
• No published uptime SLA and email-only support — the small team behind it is both why it is cheap and the main risk.

Sources

• https://cleavr.io/pricing/
• https://cleavr.io/
• https://linkedin.com/company/cleavr
• https://tracxn.com/d/companies/cleavr/__u8vaqthb143gyUEAQr-fu3umuCWAwDktzJd1Xwe-6NM
• https://getlatka.com/companies/cleavr.io
• https://app-clap.com/software/cleavr
• https://conversiongems.com/tools/cleavr
• https://servercompass.app/compare/cleavr